# Higgs!

I’m sure most of you have already seen the announcement. The LHC announced some preliminary results regarding the Higgs Boson this morning. Here’s the upshot:

1. Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments (which are ostensibly independent) see something consistent with a Higgs with relatively high significance (3.6 $sigma$ for ATLAS and 1.9 $sigma$ for CMS) at about 126 GeV (about 135 times the mass of a proton).
2. Even combining the results, this still falls shy of 5$sigma$ which is the usual criterion for a “detection.” Still, these results are suggestive enough and consistent enough that I, for one, personally believe that we’ve seen the Higgs (and have a pretty good idea of its mass). The folks on the Nobel committee will probably wait until 5-$sigma$ before giving out a prize, and who knows who they’ll actually give it to.
3. The mass of the Higgs is very consistent with what we expected from the Standard Model.

In tomorrow’s “Ask a Physicist” column, I’ll be doing a Higgs roundup. People should ask any and all questions about the discovery (the comments section below is as good a place as any), and I’ll answer as many as possible in the column.

Exciting times!

-Dave

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### One Response to Higgs!

1. Gnomic says:

Is there an anti-Higgs? And does it create anti-gravity?

What does a Higgs decompose into?

How does a Higgs create mass in other particles?

How does the Higgs interact with other particles?

What interesting theories does the Higgs rule out?