Higgs Boson Discovery?

I'm hearing a lot of buzz around the Higgs this morning.
I haven't done any digging but it sounds to me like a discovery!

www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news...has-been-found.html#

Exciting!

We are holding printing of several newspapers for this. Rumer is teh Americans found it 20 years ago but could not see it in the data, and CERN confirmed the discovery last week.

BIG NEWS!!

Confirmed !

www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science...sts-announce-1131968

Some caution is still required.

For an official discovery of a new particle we need a detection at 5 sigma and a confirmation by a second independent team - also of five sigma.

Five sigma is a very high bar that the particle physicists set themselves.

What we have is a detection at 5 sigma and a confirmation at 4.9 sigma (all data).
(by choosing two optimal, selective, experimental data sets, the confirmation can be declared to be 5 sigma - but this isn't good science).
Therefore we, strictly, are not quite there. But to deny this detection would be getting very pinickity. I believe they have a new particle.

Question now is - is it the Higgs boson - or something closely related.

Jury is out - but I believe that we have achieved something spectacular.

Mark C.

Hi Mark.

I'm not sure I understand sigma. Is it the different energy levels at which they perform the experiments at the LHC?

I remember the announcement last year when they said they had made certain detections, but that the lower energy level they were testing at indicated that the higgs might be detectable at higher energies. Or does the sigma number just relate to the kind of particles that they are colliding?

Am I making any sense?

One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data,
3 sigma counts as an observation
5-sigma result is a discovery.

Eamonn