In the Dark

The rumors about the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] have begun again, and since that’s all anyone is going to want to talk about until we actually get the news for real, at the ICHEP conference in Melbourne in a couple of weeks, we may as well get started.

[This is especially true since we learned last year that some well-known non-particle-physicist bloggers have information pipelines directly into the experiments.  It is perhaps inevitable that there are scientists who see it in their best interest to subvert the scientific process.]

The current hot rumor is that the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS have seen, in the new 2012 data, very roughly what they saw last December in the 2011 data, at least as far as the signal from a Higgs decaying to two photons (particles of light) in the mass range of 125 GeV/c².