Overexcited Rumors of LHC Higgs Boson Discovery

Rumors, a leaked memo and the most powerful particle accelerator in the world? No, it's not another Wikileak exposé (or the subject of the next Dan Brown novel), it's premature excitement about the potential discovery of the most elusive particle in the quantum physics world.

Deja vu? Yes, especially since last year's Tevatron rumor about the discovery of a "light" Higgs particle and other miscellaneous murmurings of potential Higgs signals in recent months.

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But this new rumor comes from a leaked CERN internal memo where excited physicists have obviously seen something odd in their data, but it's a long way from a bona fide Higgs discovery.

The story basically goes like this: Reporting on a rumor about a Higgs discovery, Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit received a comment on his blog, Not Even Wrong, revealing the text of a leaked CERN document.

Here's a segment from the abstract of the document:

"...we observe a γγ resonance around 115~GeV/c2 with a significance of 4σ. The event rate for this resonance is about thirty times larger than the expectation from Higgs to γγ in the standard model. This channel H→γγ is of great importance because the presence of new heavy particles can enhance strongly both the Higgs production cross section and the decay branching ratio. This large enhancement over the standard model rate implies that the present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model. Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future."

The detection of an excess of photons at this energy range may reveal the location of the Higgs particles at a mass-energy of 115 GeV/c². The photons might be the result of single Higgs particles decaying into two photons, as predicted by the Standard Model. But the photon signal that has apparently been spotted is very high.

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"It's the sort of thing you would expect to see if there were a Higgs at that mass, but the number of events seen is about 30 times more than the standard model would predict," Woit points out in his blog.

Could this signal reveal Higgs particles at this energy? Or could it be new physics beyond the Standard Model?

Jon Butterworth, LHC ATLAS experiment physicist and writer for the Guardian's "Life and Physics" blog rules out that this memo is a hoax, but urges caution when trying to interpret preliminary results.

In an interview on the UK's Channel 4, Butterworth emphasized that physicists are doing science on the cutting edge; the results they gather as a matter of routine is often something no one has ever seen before. Excited internal memos are therefore pretty common, and understandable.

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"What's happened here is a bunch of people have spent four nights without sleep and they've made some plots and got rather overexcited," Butterworth said. "[The researchers have] sent an internal note around the [ATLAS] collaboration -- which is fine, everyone's excited there -- but unfortunately it's leaked out."

"If we got this excited about every single thing, no one would get any sleep."

Other scientists have been quick to say that putting any credibility on leaked documents is flawed. In an interview for Live Science, physicist Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University said, "It is actually quite illegitimate and unscientific to talk publicly about internal collaboration material before it is approved. So this 'result' is not a result until the collaboration officially releases it."

So the take-home message is simple: When following news from the exciting, leading edge of scientific research, rumors and preemptive (unofficial) documents are rife. It's best to wait until the research has been scrutinized by peer review and published before drawing any conclusions.

Image: A graphic of a Higgs boson decay event. Credit: DESY Hamburg/interactions.org

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