As discussed in this blog post in Scientific American (see blog post here) the Tevatron experiments may have a few last interesting things to say when it comes to the Higgs Boson at the March meetings.
At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) spokes person Rob Roser said that we can expect “something interesting” coming from the Tevatron in the coming month.
Now normally I don’t get into the excitement of “hints” of the Higgs because now it seems you can’t sneeze with out causing a “3-sigma” deviation in you data. However, if we are to take the last results from the LHC seriously and there is an intriguing deviation around 125 GeV for the Higgs search the data from the Tevatron might be very well suited to being sensitive to seeing evidence for the Higgs.
Atlas results for the search for the Higgs boson with an intriguing "peak" around 125 GeV
For me, this only goes back to a debate that was going on almost a year ago, and this was whether or not we should extend the run of the Tevatron. One of the more compelling arguments that was made was exactly the scenario that is playing out and goes something like this…
“If the Higgs is low mass as other experimental results suggest then the Tevatron is well posed to be sensitive to the Higgs mass and can provide a completely independent discovery of this elusive particle and aid in measuring many of the properties of the Higgs and unlock many of the mysteries to the universe and the origins of mass.”
However, this didn’t compel enough people to make this happen, so we are left with this opportunity for the Tevatron to contribute to the Higgs search at a maximum of 3-sigma confirmation due to limited data samples.
Now of course this whole discussion is predicated on the fact that the Higgs lives in a low mass range (if it lives anywhere) all of which is not proven anywhere yet…
So this is just to say that the Tevatron is/was a great experiment and is still actively contributing to the discovery process unfolding every day in High Energy Physics and we should all stay tuned for this possible independent confirmation or refutation of the claims of where the Higgs boson may live.
Some great posts about the Higgs from my fellow bloggers:
Why do we expect a Higgs Boson? Part II Unitarization of Vector Boson Scattering
It Might Look Like a Higgs, But Does it Really Sing Like One?
