This morning, the spokespeople for the two main detectors at the
Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, gave talks on their teams'
latest results in the search for the Higgs boson. As expected,
the results were a bit ambiguous, as the signals that are
consistent with the presence of the Higgs didn't rise much above
two standard deviations away from background noise. But the
details were even more confusing. Although both teams see
signals in roughly the same area, CMS sees two of them, and
appears to exclude the area where ATLAS' signal peaks. The Higgs
boson is predicted to be the last undetected particle of the
Standard Model. It's a necessary outcome of the Higgs field,
which provides the other particles mass. There are other ways of
producing a Higgs field (and other ways of having a Higgs-like
particle), but all of these require extensive modification of
the Standard Model. Since the Standard Model works extremely
well, researchers have been searching for the expected Higgs
particle; the LHC was designed