Rumor: LHC Sees Hint of the Higgs Boson

A leaked internal memo from physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva reports a whiff of the Higgs boson, the long-sought theoretical particle that could make or break the standard model of particle physics.

The preliminary note, which is still under review, was posted April 21 in an anonymous comment on physicist Peter Woit’s blog, “Not Even Wrong.” Four physicists claim that ATLAS, one of the LHC’s all-purpose particle hunting experiments, caught a Higgs particle decaying into two high-energy photons — but at a much higher rate than the standard model predicts.

“The present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model,” the note says. “Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future.”

The word from CERN, which operates the LHC, is that the leaked note is not an official result, and hasn’t been backed up by the cast of thousands that makes up the rest of the ATLAS collaboration.

“It’s way, way too early to say if there’s anything in it or not,” said CERN spokesman James Gillies. “The vast majority of these notes get knocked down before they ever see the light of day.”

A member of the ATLAS collaboration who wished to remain anonymous noted that unexpected signals show up in the data pretty frequently, and turn out to be due to errors or biases that went uncorrected. The signal is much more likely to be a fluke than anything else.

The mood in the physics blogosphere is mixed between cautious excitement and outright denial.

“It may well turn out to be a false alarm … or it could be the discovery of the century … stay tuned,” wrote a blogger called Jester at Résonaances, a blog that covers particle theory from Paris.

But graduate student Sarah Kavassalis at The Language of Bad Physics counters, “Until there is an official statement from the collaboration, or even one of the co-authors, this is just gossip. Don’t get excited. Seriously.”

This isn’t the first time a Higgs rumor has swept the physics community, either. A possible detection came from the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, in July 2010. Blogger and physicist Tommaso Dorigo notes that CDF ought to have seen this new signal if it’s really there.

Whether the Higgs is there or not, the paper is real. Physicists with access to the paper say it begins, “It is the purpose of this Note to report the first experimental observation at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the Higgs particle.”

“It’s exciting stuff if it’s true,” Gillies said.

Read more at Wired Science