Scientists Getting Closer to Higgs Boson Discovery
Scientists who are studying the Higgs boson hinted that they are getting closer to discovering the last piece of Higgs boson. The Higgs boson discovery would mean that they are closing in to one of the most important scientific discovery of the last century.
Higgs boson, dubbed as the "god particle", is said to give mass and order to the universe. Physicist at the Fermi National Accelator Lab in Illinois revealed that they are "getting closer" to discovering this important scientific finding. Other physicists from Cern, a European particle accelerator near Geneva are also scheduled to disclose their own Higgs boson discovery. Cern utilizes the world's most powerful particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for this experiment.
The results of the study came from 10 years of data from Tevatron, a powerful atom-smasher that started in 1985 and closed down last year. The Tevatron results reveal that if the Higgs particle exists, it has a mass between 115 and 135 gigaelectronvolts (GeV/c2), or about 130 times the mass of the proton. Based on the experiments that were conducted (CDF and DZero), the results reveal that there is only a 1 in a 550 chance that the signal is just a statistical fluke. Despite that, the statistical significance of the signal was revealed at 2.9 sigma which is not relevant enough to meet the five sigma threshold that is required in order to state that the particle has been "officially" discovered.
Luciano Ristori, a physicist at Fermilab and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) disclosed his thoughts about the experiment stating "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. 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".
As for the statistical significance shown in the study, Dmitri Denisov, DZero spokesman and physicist at Fermilab addressed this issue stating "We achieved a critical step in the search for the Higgs boson, 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."