Thursday, 28 April 2011

ATLAS shrugged

A new rumor propagating via twitter, social networks and other attributes of modern civilization says that the old rumor was just a rumor. The ATLAS collaboration was working hard this last week to investigate the possible signal of Higgs decaying to photons. Observations of such a signal was claimed in an internal memo written by 4 of its members. However, after analyzing about 100 pb-1 of currently available data ATLAS concluded that the suspicious excess in the γγ invariant mass distribution is going away. C'est la vie, as the local folks would say. A parallel rumor says that CMS sees nothing unusual in the γγ channel. That would pretty much end the career of the first LHC rumor. Maybe it's for the better. Otherwise the Higgs boson would have to be renamed to the Wu boson which could lead to some confusion.

Anyway, same time tomorrow, we must have a winner one day...

Update: ATLAS officially quashes the rumor. With 131 pb-1 of data there is no peak in the γγ invariant mass spectrum near 115 GeV.

10 comments:

  1. Anonymous28 April 2011 at 05:16

    Very disappointing.

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  2. Anonymous28 April 2011 at 05:39

    Jester, will D0 say something about the CDF dijet anomaly soon? Some told me D0 could have results by the end of this month.

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  3. Anonymous28 April 2011 at 06:25

    There's already a D0 result that looks relevant (looser cuts, though): http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/HIGGS/H78/

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  4. Jester28 April 2011 at 10:37

    Yeah, people say that a new W+jj paper from D0 is imminent but there are various opinions how conclusive it will be.

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  5. Sarai Pahla29 April 2011 at 18:43

    You guys in the physics world have no idea how the rest of us have been following this... well, the physics geeks, anyway. I think having been aware of your blogs helped me not get caught up in the hype!

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  6. Anonymous30 April 2011 at 06:27

    "A new rumor propagating via twitter"

    and this is what the scientific method has come down to? sad...very sad...

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  7. Unknown4 May 2011 at 13:16

    It's an interesting title, kerker.

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  8. Coin4 May 2011 at 21:25

    Huh. But what happens when a rumor and an anti-rumor collide?

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  9. Aaron5 May 2011 at 14:05

    sorry for the dumb question, but what is that beastie supposed to symbolize? the Higgs?

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  10. Jester5 May 2011 at 14:50

    the beastie higgs with 30 times the standard model cross section into photons

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