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[DaveMorton]

That's one HECK of a catcher's mitt, don't you think?

[Snowcrash]

Caught this article from the RSS feeds on the main forum page. Supersymmetry is looking like a wrong theory.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570

[Snowcrash]

The latest conference in Mumbai states...

ATLAS and CMS have excluded the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region 145 to 466 GeV with 95 percent certainty.

So it's looking like the Higgs doesn't exist. Only time will tell.

Article here.

[Snowcrash]

It's that time of year when CERN shuts down for the winter, so no new science being done for a few months.

But, and it's a biggie, there have been some press releases saying they think they've found the Higgs boson.

It appears to be around 125 GeV, which is the low end for our current therories (standard model). The certainty level is about 1.8 to 2.5 sigma so it's not a discovery yet (has to be 5 sigma) and there will be no more data 'till next year.

Cern press release here.
Bad Astonomy blog here.

[Snowcrash]

To put a little more perspective on what 125 GeV means...

The rest mass of a proton is approx 1 GeV (actually 0.938 GeV. I did look this up) or 1.672621777(74)×10 -27  kg if you dislike electron volts (eV).

So, it's about 125 times the mass of a proton.

[Snowcrash]

The LHC is up but not yet running for the year they find the Higgs, hopefully. They are planning a ramp in power from 3.5 TeV to 4 TeV. The collisions being twice this value. The max the machine can do is 7 TeV but we're 2-3 years or so off from that at the mo. with a 20 month technical stop at the end of this year to upgrade the machine.

Here's the live data from the dashboard.

And press releases here.

[Snowcrash]

The LHC is up and running and doing science.

Another record hit on the 5th Apr 2012 of 8TeV. Article here.

The beams are running at a little over 100MJ per beam. This will go up as the weeks go on due to putting more protons per bunch and more bunches. Currently at 1380 bunches and about 1E11 (100,000 million) protons per bunch. And it takes 1 million protons to create 1 anti-proton.

I expect it'll be the end of summer before anything is anounced about the Higgs.

Google visited last this page May 11, 2012, 06:41:04 AM