“We’ve observed a new particle.” That’s the opening statement in a video featuring Joe Incandela, the spokesman for the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS detector, made in a video that is currently publicly accessible on the CERN website. The video, first spotted by ScienceNews and now apparently pulled, appears to preempt the big announcement scheduled for early tomorrow morning. It also implies that this year’s data was enough to push the evidence for the Higgs past the five standard deviations needed to declare discovery.
“When we say we’ve observed the particle, it means we’ve just got enough data to say it’s definitely there, and it’s very unlikely to go away,” Incandela says in the video. In addition, we know it’s a boson because it decays into two photons.
Its mass is roughly 130 times that of the proton, making it the heaviest boson we’ve discovered so far—and the heaviest particle other than the top quark.
The two-photon decay is one of the strongest bits of evidence, and provides a narrow peak that helps define its mass. Strong evidence is also available through decay into two Z particles; the signal is there in other decay channels as well, but those are less definitive because of the background noise present.
from Ars Technica