Elusive Higgs slips from sight again

Technology 4 May 2011

Now you see it, now you don’t. Rather like a conjurer’s white rabbit, the elusive Higgs boson may have slipped from sight again.

A recent report hinted at a glimpse of the long-sought particle at a major detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. But a second detector has now checked its own data and found no corroborating sign of the particle.

The Higgs boson is thought to endow other particles with mass, but has yet to be observed. Four physicists associated with the LHC’s ATLAS detector claimed to have found an anomalous “bump” in its data, possibly due to Higgs particles decaying into pairs of photons. An abstract of their study was leaked online in April.

Bump, what bump?

Now physicists working on the LHC’s other main detector, CMS, have come up empty in an initial search for a similar bump in their data, according to a document shown to New Scientist. So ATLAS’s bump may not be due to Higgs particles, after all, but instead down to something mundane, such as an error in the analysis.


The internal CMS document has not been released to the public, so the result is still preliminary, as was the news of the original ATLAS bump, for that matter, which was leaked before it was reviewed or endorsed by the ATLAS collaboration.

Both leaks are a testament to the excitement surrounding the Higgs. With a result this hot on the horizon, expect more fits and starts in the months to come.

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