Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Higgs one more time

The CDF and D0 experiments reported "final" results on the Higgs search. I’m not sure about D0, but the CDF result used all the available data, which made the limits better than before. But so also did the combination of many different analyses, some of them only improving the limits by a fraction of a percent, and each one of which took man-years of effort. Many of these (I was keeping posted on one of them that took, if I have have the details right, 4 months for a student to just re-run an existing analysis on the final data set) would, by themselves, give lousy limits, but when carefully combined they helped squeeze the limits tighter.

It can get a little frustrating to look at the "Brazil plots" (so called because they look sort of like the flag of Brazil) at update after update and not see any dramatic changes, but the walls of the valley creep outward bit by bit and the peak of the hill rises little by little.

Unfortunately, unless we come up with some amazing new methods, I think CDF and D0 are about tapped out here. They won’t be getting any more data.

And I'm working on a different experiment now, so I won't have a lot of Higgs updates in the future.

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