Fermilab experiments narrow allowed mass range for Higgs boson
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| Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at DOE's Fermilab have combined Tevatron data from their two experiments to increase the sensitivity for their search for the Higgs boson. While no Higgs boson has been found yet, the results announced today exclude a mass for the Higgs between 158 and 175 GeV/c2. |
New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results today (July 26) at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.
The Fermilab experiments now exclude a Higgs particle with a mass between 158 and 175 GeV/c2. Searches by previous experiments and constraints due to the Standard Model of Particles and Forces indicate that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. For comparison: 100 GeV/c2 is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton.) The new Fermilab result rules out about a quarter of the expected Higgs mass range.
"Fermilab has pushed the productivity of the Tevatron collider to new heights," said Dennis Kovar, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. "Thanks to the extraordinary performance of Fermilab's Tevatron collider, CDF and DZero collaborators from around the world are producing exciting results and are making immense progress on the search for the Higgs particle."
At the ICHEP conference, CDF and DZero scientists are giving more than 40 talks on searches for exotic particles and dark matter candidates, discoveries of new decay channels of known particles and precision measurements of numerous particle properties. Together, the two collaborations present about 150 results.
The Higgs particle is the last not-yet-observed piece of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of Particles and Forces. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson explains why some particles have mass and others do not.
"We are close to completely ruling out a Higgs boson with a large mass," said DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov, one of 500 scientists from 19 countries working on the DZero experiment. "Three years ago, we would not have thought that this would be possible. With more data coming in, our experiments are beginning to be sensitive to a low-mass Higgs boson."
Robert Roser, co-spokesperson for the 550 physicists from 13 countries of the CDF collaboration, also credited the great work of the CDF and DZero analysis groups for the stringent Higgs exclusion results.
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