Previously in 2000, researchers at the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) at CERN in Switzerland caught a whiff of the Higgs at a mass of 115 GeV, just before they switched LEP off for good. But their statistics were not good enough to draw any firm conclusions.
“[Finding the Higgs] is one of the most important discoveries in science,” says Al Goshaw, a researcher at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator in Batavia, Illinois. Now, however, fresh predictions from Fermilab reported in New Scientist have dashed hopes of finding the Higgs for at least the next six years. Until last week Tevatron researchers believed they would be able to generate enough particle collisions at high enough energies to confirm or reject LEP’s signal within a few years. But new tests and estimates of the Tevatron’s capabilities reveal that this is highly unlikely. Although the collider in its current configuration might still be able to show that the Higgs does not exist at 115 GeV (a measurement of its energy or mass), it will almost certainly not be able to disprove the Higgs at higher masses and will not be able to prove the existence of the particle at any energy.
Improvements to the Tevatron which would allow a more comprehensive Higgs search will not be available until 2009. That’s two years after the scheduled startup of another Higgs searching machine, the so-called Atlas detector, which will come online at five stories tall and weighing in at 7,000 tons by 2007. The Atlas is being built in Europe by CERN, who now takes the lead in the horserace to make the greatest scientific discovery out there right now. But don’t count Mother Nature out of the race either – she may yet have a few unexpected tricks left up her sleeve…
I happened to work at Fermilab as an undergraduate in the summer of 1984 – it was a great experience, and I came away very impressed with what a large organized group of scientists could do together. I also came away knowing experimental particle physics was really not for me (I had spent the summer programming in assembly language on a PDP-11, which was sort of fun, but not really physics)… Leon Lederman, who wrote that “God Particle” book, was Fermilab’s director at the time, and he was always chumming around with us young people at the cookie sessions after weekly seminars.
Anyway, what’s happening in this instance is kind of different from the pursuit of the Higgs in the past; this time it’s the accelerator that is failing to meet up to expectations, rather than nature. Kind of sad, with such a long illustrious history, that Fermilab’s fallen on such difficulties. I wonder, if they were so far off on this one, would the Superconducting Supercollider Congress killed in the 1990’s ever have worked?