Katey Shirey's List: Physics

energy level of seven trillion electron volts since March 31, 2010, the LHC has been amassing petabytes of data that are being analyzed by a grid of interlinked computers worldwide in search of the missing boson. And yesterday, August 22, at the Biennial International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, the bombshell was dropped: CERN scientists declared that over the entire range of energy the Collider had explored—from 145 to 466 billion electron volts—the Higgs boson is excluded as a possibility with a 95% probability.

The search for the Higgs is a statistical hunt that involves looking at the particles that emanate from the high-energy collisions of protons inside the LHC, measuring their energies and directions of flight, as well as other parameters, and trying to assess whether it is likely that some of these particles result from the decay of a Higgs boson created by the collision. These assessments carry a probability measure, such as 95%, 99%, or—as traditionally required in particle physics for a “definitive” conclusion about the existence of a new particle: 99.99997% (this is the infamous “five-sigma” requirement