Higgs ?

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Xymox
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Higgs ?

Post by Xymox » Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:02 pm

There is a lot of rumor flying about the possible discovery of the Higgs because of a leaked UNVETTED/rumored paper that has not even been peer reviewed or released yet.

Its all about 2-photon resonance around 115 GeV seen in ATLAS..
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/short ... nline-news

Lets stay grounded here. Any results MUST be viewed by peers to look from unforeseen things that could have created this bump in the results. Most likely ITS NOT THE HIGGS. Its just some anomaly in the data.

NO ONE GET EXCITED..

When the paper hits what needs to be in the press are not things like "HIGGS DISCOVERED" because this is simply not true. It will take TIME to PROVE and a first announcement that something seems a tad odd in the results is NOT any kind of result. Its a strange bump in the data that needs to be looked at. THATS ALL...

Anyway...

Imagine how difficult it would be for ATLAS if they had possible data that MIGHT be the higgs and the press goes nutz - and they will go nutz... They publish a paper for peer review and it turns out it was just a unforeseen anomaly... Man I would be plenty nervous about putting a paper up for peer review. Your career is at stake, your reputation is at stake.. But its gotta be done... Its one of those things you just gotta trust in the force.. hehehe....

But I think its also important to not hold on to the paper too long trying to vet it yourself. Best to publish and see what happens...

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Xymox
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Re: Higgs ?

Post by Xymox » Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:09 pm

In fact this rumor is already outta control completly... Just a snippit of some possible paper and rumor goes crazy... I think its best to just publish the paper at this point because the rumor is getting outta control and has little to do with the facts in the possible paper..

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl= ... =&aql=&oq=

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by CharmQuark » Tue Apr 26, 2011 3:04 am

Wow news sure is traveling fast :|
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted with large ones either by Albert Einstein.

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by Kasuha » Tue Apr 26, 2011 6:13 am

This quote from somethingawful got my attention:
StarkingBarfish wrote: Hi there, Sorry I didn't drop in earlier, but I'm on holiday for easter.

This "potential discovery of the Higgs" is anything but I'm afraid. I've had a read of the paper, and there are a few things that are important to note here.

1: It's an ATLAS COM note, which is meant to be internal to the ATLAS experiment and has absolutely _no_ peer review. Anyone in ATLAS can write a note like this, and it could be total bullshit. The next stage in the process is to write an internal note, which is put under somewhat more scrutiny by the collaboration prior to turning it into a publication if it's considered good enough to do so

2: The person heading up this note, Ms. Wu, is famous both inside and outside ATLAS for spamming vast amounts of notes out in the hope that one of them will be of some merit. She's hell-bent on finding the Higgs in the way that Rubbia was in finding the W boson back in the day. Sometimes people sacrifice good physics for the desire to get the prize. She "found" the Higgs at the LEP experiment at 115GeV in the gamma gamma channel as well, but this discovery was ruled out then too.

3: The analysis is flaky to say the least- they don't model the background at all, and merely fit to the distribution shape. In QCD backgrounds are very important. That bump could come from anywhere, either a detector, trigger or physical effect arising from a background distribution they don't understand

4: If the bump genuinely is a particle, it is _NOT_ a standard model Higgs. They find about 30 events in the peak, which with the data we have now is much too many to be a Higgs- it would mean the number of Higgs produced is about a factor of 10 or more larger than the Standard Model allows for. We'd have seen it in the US Tevatron experiments, and maybe even at LEP if it was produced as copiously as this. What it _could_ be is something new and non-standard model. If it is that's amazing, but again it's hard to imagine something that only appears at LHC energies and not at those of the tevatron in such copious amounts

5: This has caused a massive shitstorm in ATLAS because internally everyone knows it's poo poo, but it leaked within about 10 minutes of being circulated internally and the press/bloggers have jumped on it like it's evidence that god exists, elvis has returned from his trip to mars, and flying pigs use antigravity to get around.

The party line from the experiment is "This is not an official ATLAS publication". The general feeling is that the backgrounds need to be understood, the analysis needs monte-carlo simulation to back it up, and that the group who produced these results should have put a lot more effort into the publication before spamming it and claiming "first post".

I should put a huge disclaimer here: I'm not a member of the ALTAS collaboration, though I do work at CERN. My speciality is not Higgs physics, so my understanding of this only comes from a general particle physics background. Any opinion I express here is my own and not for republication.
I'd like to add... not only in QCD it's good to know the background... ;)

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by CharmQuark » Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:39 pm

Nice post Kashua :)

But after all this is the internet and you as well as everybody else knows how fast this kind of news travels, you could post that anywhere on the net and you would still have people saying that is could be the Higgs, its the way people's minds work. at the end of the day WE know they have NOT found the HIGGS but do others? thats the dangerous thing ain't it?
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted with large ones either by Albert Einstein.

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by Xymox » Tue Apr 26, 2011 2:08 pm

5: This has caused a massive shitstorm in ATLAS because internally everyone knows it's poo poo, but it leaked within about 10 minutes of being circulated internally and the press/bloggers have jumped on it like it's evidence that god exists, elvis has returned from his trip to mars, and flying pigs use antigravity to get around.
Elvis didn't return from his trip ? But I saw him in Vegas ?

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by DCWhitworth » Thu Apr 28, 2011 2:29 pm

Wouldn't be a fuss if they hadn't mentioned the 'H' word. Wouldn't have been picked up by most of the press, probably wouldn't have been leaked in the first place.
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Re: Higgs ?

Post by Kasuha » Thu Apr 28, 2011 7:34 pm

There's already a rumor circulating that after recalculating it with more Atlas data the signal dissolved and similar search on CMS data did not show anything at all. But I can't find any reliable source.

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Re: Higgs ?

Post by JulietLove » Sat Jul 02, 2011 5:16 am

News The most advanced and probably would not have been leaked in the first place.

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