New Scientist | Short Sharp Science | 12 July 2010
Could the elusive Higgs boson finally be in sight? On his blog, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua writes about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
"It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result," writes Dorigo.
The blog post is low on detail but if the "three-sigma" signature - a reference to the statistical certainty of the rumoured result - turns out to be real, it will be an immense discovery.
The Higgs, sometimes called the "God particle", was proposed to explain why particles have mass. It is the only particle in the standard model of particle physics that hasn't been found. Spotting it would confirm the theory, while ruling it out would point the way to more exotic, new theories.
The Tevatron has been making steady progress in the hunt for the standard model Higgs. Over the years, data collected by the DZero and CDF experiments at the collider have whittled down the window of possible masses where the particle might be found. Last year, Tevatron physicists predicted that they'd have enough data by early 2011 to either find or rule out the Higgs and estimated they have a 50% chance of spotting it by the end of 2010.
It's hard to know what to make of the rumour all by itself. But more news may be coming soon from Paris, where particle physicists will meet in a few weeks to present their results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
