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120702141716.htm
Tevatron Scientists Announce Their Final Results On the Higgs Particle
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After more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the U.S.
Department of Energy's Tevatron collider, scientists from the CDF and DZero
experiments have found their strongest indication to date for the long-sought
Higgs particle. The Tevatron results indicate that the Higgs particle, if it
exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c2, or about 130 times the mass of
the proton. (Credit: Image courtesy of Fermilab)
ScienceDaily (July 2, 2012) After more than 10 years of gathering and
analyzing data produced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Tevatron collider,
scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations have found their strongest
indication to date for the long-sought Higgs particle. Squeezing the last bit
of information out of 500 trillion collisions produced by the Tevatron for each
experiment since March 2001, the final analysis of the data does not settle the
question of whether the Higgs particle exists, but gets closer to an answer.
The Tevatron scientists unveiled their latest results on July 2, two days
before the highly anticipated announcement of the latest Higgs-search results
from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
"The Tevatron experiments accomplished the goals that we had set with this data
sample," said Fermilab's Rob Roser, cospokesperson for the CDF experiment at
DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "Our data strongly point toward
the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments
at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery."
Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the Tevatron received a
round of rousing applause from hundreds of colleagues when they presented their
results at a scientific seminar at Fermilab. The Large Hadron Collider results
will be announced at a scientific seminar at 2 a.m. CDT on July 4 at the CERN
particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
"It is a real cliffhanger," said DZero co-spokesperson Gregorio Bernardi,
physicist at the Laboratory of Nuclear and High Energy Physics, or LPNHE, at
the University of Paris VI & VII. "We know exactly what signal we are looking
for in our data, and we see strong indications of the production and decay of
Higgs bosons in a crucial decay mode with a pair of bottom quarks, which is
difficult to observe at the LHC. We are very excited about it."
The Higgs particle is named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who among
other physicists in the 1960s helped develop the theoretical model that
explains why some particles have mass and others don't, a major step toward
understanding the origin of mass. The model predicts the existence of a new
particle, which has eluded experimental detection ever since. Only high-energy
particle colliders such as the Tevatron, which was shut down in September 2011,
and the Large Hadron Collider, which produced its first collisions in November
2009, have the chance to produce the Higgs particle. About 1,700 scientists
from U.S. institutions, including Fermilab, are working on the LHC experiments.
The Tevatron results indicate that the Higgs particle, if it exists, has a mass
between 115 and 135 GeV/c2, or about 130 times the mass of the proton.
"During its life, the Tevatron must have produced thousands of Higgs particles,
if they actually exist, and it's up to us to try to find them in the data we
have collected," said Luciano Ristori, co-spokesperson of the CDF experiment
and physicist at Fermilab and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
(INFN) . "We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to
identify Higgs-like patterns. Still, it is easier to look for a friend's face
in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like
event among trillions of collisions."
The final Tevatron results corroborate the Higgs search results that scientists
from the Tevatron and the LHC presented at physics conferences in March 2012.
The search for the Higgs particle at the Tevatron focuses on a different decay
mode than the search at the LHC. According to the theoretical framework known
as the Standard Model of Particles, Higgs bosons can decay in many different
ways. Just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using
different combinations of coins, the Higgs can decay into different
combinations of particles. At the LHC, the experiments can most easily observe
the existence of a Higgs particle by searching for its decay into two energetic
photons. At the Tevatron, experiments most easily see the decay of a Higgs
particle into a pair of bottom quarks.
Tevatron scientists found that the observed Higgs signal in the combined CDF
and DZero data in the bottom-quark decay mode has a statistical significance of
2.9 sigma. This means there is only a 1-in-550 chance that the signal is due to
a statistical fluctuation.
"We achieved a critical step in the search for the Higgs boson," said Dmitri
Denisov, DZero cospokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. "While 5-sigma
significance is required for a discovery, it seems unlikely that the Tevatron
collisions mimicked a Higgs signal. Nobody expected the Tevatron to get this
far when it was built in the 1980s."
The Tevatron is one of eight particle accelerators and storage rings on the
Fermilab site. The largest, operational accelerator at Fermilab now is the
2-mile-circumference Main Injector, which provides particles for the
laboratory's neutrino and muon research programs.
The CDF and DZero collaborations submitted their joint Higgs search results to
the electronic preprint archive arXiv.org. The paper also is available at:
http://tevnphwg.fnal.gov/results/SM_Higgs_Summer_12/
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DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (2012, July 2). Tevatron scientists
announce their final results on the Higgs particle. ScienceDaily. Retrieved
July 2, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com
/releases/2012/07/120702141716.htm
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