Is the Higgs boson real?

[centurian]

Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson.

exciting stuff

Could be 2 Nobel prizes coming up then, with their "discovery" of FTL neutrino's still holding.

Although the latter, if validated, is way more significant. It could blow the whole Standard Model apart.

[scooterscot]

Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson.

exciting stuff

Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday's seminar on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson.

I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle.

Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery.