(July 2, 2012) After more
than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the U.S. Department
of Energy’s Tevatron collider, scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations
have found their strongest indication to date for the long-sought Higgs
particle. Squeezing the last bit of information out of 500 trillion collisions
produced by the Tevatron for each experiment since March 2001, the final
analysis of the data does not settle the question of whether the Higgs particle
exists, but gets closer to an answer. The Tevatron scientists unveiled their
latest results on July 2, two days before the highly anticipated announcement
of the latest Higgs-search results from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
“The
Tevatron experiments accomplished the goals that we had set with this data
sample,” said Fermilab’s Rob Roser, cospokesperson for the CDF experiment at
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “Our data strongly point toward
the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments
at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery.”
Scientists
of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the Tevatron received a round of
rousing applause from hundreds of colleagues when they presented their results
at a scientific seminar at Fermilab. The Large Hadron Collider results will be
announced at a scientific seminar at 2 a.m. CDT on July 4 at the CERN particle
physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.