Tevatron collider waves goodbye to the Higgs

Lisa Grossman, reporter

(Image: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab)

As the world waits on tenterhooks for a Higgs boson result from the Large Hadron Collider, the last great US particle smasher has made its final contribution to the hunt.

The Tevatron, which ran from March 2001 to last September at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, reported today that it has seen hints of the long-sought particle - but not enough to be certain it's really there.

The announcement comes just two days ahead of a hotly anticipated announcement from the LHC, based at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. In December, the twin Higgs-hunting experiments at the LHC announced that a hint of their quarry had showed up in their data with a mass of about 125 gigaelectronvolts. However, there wasn't enough statistical significance to be certain it wasn't a fluke.

After the Tevatron shut down, it still weighed in with its own hints of a similar-looking particle in March.

Now, having analysed more than 500 trillion collisions seen over more than a decade, the Tevatron has its final results: if it exists, the Higgs particle has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV, or about 130 times the mass of the proton.

That's consistent with what the LHC has reportedly been seeing. But because the Higgs is spotted not on its own, but by the detritus it leaves behind when it decays, the two machines are sensitive to different particles. The Tevatron worked best for Higgses that decayed into two bottom quarks, while the LHC has a better view of Higgses decaying into two photons. Theory predicts that a 125 GeV Higgs will decay into two photons more often, giving the LHC an edge.

"Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery," said Fermilab's Rob Roser, a spokesperson for the CDF experiment.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/20efa874/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A70Ccollider0Etevatron0Egoodbye0Ehiggs0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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