LHC's Higgs Gets Support From Tevatron

Well, at least they are consistent!

We are starting to see some agreement here with the various data coming out of different detectors and different facilities. A new report from ALL the data analyzed out of the now-departed Tevatron shows a hint of the Higgs in the same energy range as that reported earlier out of the LHC. It seems that both CDF and D0 might be seeing the same thing that ATLAS and CMS saw recently.

Located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron smashed protons into antiprotons to blast into fleeting existence subatomic particles not ordinarily seen in nature. Those collisions occurred within two massive particle detectors, known as CDF and D0, which strived to identify new particles as they quickly decayed into combinations of more familiar ones. In their final data sets, both the CDF and D0 teams see more candidate Higgs decays than one would expect from random background processes, scientists reported today at the conference Rencontres de Moriond in La Thuile, Italy.

The excesses are in line with Higgs hints reported in December 2011 by researchers working with the LHC at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC smashes protons into protons within two even bigger detectors that are hunting the Higgs, called ATLAS and CMS. The ATLAS and CMS teams both see excesses of candidate Higgses with a mass of about 125 giga-electron volts (GeV), or 133 times the mass of the proton. The CDF and D0 teams see candidates with roughly the same mass although with poorer mass resolution. "If you look at what ATLAS sees, at what CMS sees, and at what CDF and D0 see, it starts to look like a consistent picture," says Fermilab's Rob Roser, co-spokesperson for CDF.

While the data out of the Tevatron can't do much in terms of providing the evidence for the Higgs, it certainly can throw a huge wrench if the results aren't consistent or contradictory to that out of the LHC. So this agreement here certainly help as part of the process in gaining credibility. Ultimately, the verification for the existence of the Higgs will have to come from the upcoming LHC run that will provide a significantly more data.

Zz.