Physicists at CERN cross-check ATLAS data

Physicists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have double-checked the data collected so far by the ATLAS detector, and have found no “traces” of the Higgs boson, rumors about the discovery of which caused a stir in the scientific community in April.

In the blog of mathematician Peter Voight on April 18, an unknown commentator left a fragment from the internal correspondence of the ATLAS collaboration. The document said that scientists were able to detect traces of the decay of the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that determines the mass of all other elementary particles. The search for the Higgs boson is one of the main tasks of the Large Hadron Collider.

The authors of the “leaked” note, addressed to the rest of the participants in the experiment on the ATLAS detector, analyzed data on one of the types of events that may indicate the birth of the Higgs boson. It was about the appearance of two gamma photons, into which the “light version” of the Higgs boson with a mass less than 115 gigaelectronvolts per square of the speed of light can decay (physicists measure particle masses in energy units, electronvolts, based on Einstein’s formula, E = mc2).

CERN officials called this information “baseless rumors” and said that this is nothing more than the most preliminary results that can be refuted in the course of further analysis.

Now physicists of the ATLAS collaboration have rechecked all data on such events and did not find traces of the Higgs boson in them.

Scientists analyzed data on proton collisions collected in 2010 and 2011, and found no deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model. The corresponding article is posted on the official CERN website.