Not sure where to put this... was on a news feed, but I do not consider it news and it could go in with Space or Science/Technology... move where you see if this is not the proper place. I found this interesting enough to come share
CERN to Announce the Latest Results from ATLAS and CMS
A simulation of the two-photon channel shows what ATLAS sees when the decay of a Higgs boson results in the production of two gamma rays. The blue beads indicate intermediate massive particles, and the bright green rods are the gamma-ray tracks. While the two-photon channel is the least likely Higgs decay, it is easier to observe than others with even noisier backgrounds.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they’ve found.
“We do not yet know what will be shown on July 4th,” says Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist in the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who heads the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment. “I have seen many conjectures on the blogs about what will be shown: these are idle speculation. Things are moving very fast this week, and it’s an exciting time at CERN. Many years of hard work are coming to fruition.”
Last December, not long after the LHC had shut down for the winter, ATLAS and CMS both reported slight excesses over background of two kinds of signals consistent with the expected signature of a Higgs boson. The LHC started running again at a higher energy this spring, and, says Hinchliffe, “In that short time we’ve already doubled the data. But even if both experiments were to confirm what they saw last year with new data, no one can be certain that it is the Higgs.”
Why can’t they know? And what’s a Higgs boson anyway?
