Comments on: Higgs Papers Out

By: kam

kam — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 05:15:13 +0000

what does this mean? does it have anything to do with quantum mechanics?

By: Mike Procario

Mike Procario — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 01:22:33 +0000

On the 4th of July, I got up well after the seminars were done, so I searched on line for the talks. I found the CMS talk and showed the gamma-gamma mass plot to my wife and said, “There’s the Higgs Boson.” She replied that she preferred fields of study that were more concrete. I pointed out the a bump in a mass plot is about as concrete as it gets for a particle physicist. I was delighted to see the mass plot. The limit curves that had been published by ATLAS and CMS and before them CDF and D-Zero were really hard to explain to physicists much less no physicists.

By: MKS

MKS — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 20:59:48 +0000

It’s so cool to see the formation of a belief of Sean’s more-or-less as it happens and it must be frustrating to ‘change modes’ from doing the science and being oh so precise and conditional and then trying to communicate that information with non-scientists in English, which is another language entirely with less precision…not to mention the media with their economic need to find a narrative ASAP

By: Higgs Boson Research Papers, Get Em’ While They’re Hot! - NBitWonder

Higgs Boson Research Papers, Get Em’ While They’re Hot! - NBitWonder — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:23:07 +0000

[...] up while browsing Reddit, via Discover Magazine: We were all transfixed by the Higgs seminars on July 4, but the work was nowhere near over for the [...]

By: eyesoars

eyesoars — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:30:10 +0000

The last sentence of the CMS paper reads: “The decay to two photons indicates that the new particle is a boson with spin different from one.” Photons, IIRC, are spin 1, and two photons generated by a decay could (?) have a total spin of 2 or 0. (?) Is this what is meant by the statement?

By: Chris Greene

Chris Greene — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 20:39:13 +0000

I seem to recall there was some talk that there were fewer tau-antitau pairs than expected. Is that still there? CMS seems to have a spike at around the 100-120 range, was it ATLAS that had a lower than expected amount? Was it a spike, but not a big enough one?

By: Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:52:49 +0000

Chris– That’s a great question, I’m actually writing a post that addresses it. Short answer: the Higgs decays into two virtual Z bosons, which then decay to leptons. To be virtual, a particle must be hidden inside the decay process, just serving as a stepping-stone between what comes in and what goes out. And when a particle is virtual, it doesn’t need to have the mass of a real particle. In particular, it can be lighter. So there’s no problem with the Higgs decaying into particles that would be heavier than it if they were real, as long as those particles immediately decay into something lighter.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:33:30 +0000

One thing that has been bugging me is that the Higgs decays into two Z bosons. The Higgs is 126 GeV and the Z is 91 GeV. The daughters are heavier than the parent. Or is this similar to the muon decay which uses a W boson by violating energy conservation temporarily?

By: s johnson

s johnson — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:23:38 +0000

What is the mass of the new particle? 125.6-125.8 GeV?

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:04:47 +0000

Decent