2012-07-04, 08:17 AM
Fiel Wrote:Very happy about that. But is that enough stdev to be considered "discovered" or is there still too much doubt?
5 standard deviations is the standard for declaring something discovered in particle physics (It's 99.99994% chance of being correct, give or take a 9), so this is offically found to within the standard that this will be accepted by the majority of physicists.
Marksman Bryan Wrote:This article says the Higgs Boson is 125.3 GeV +/- 0.6 GeV and that a different type of boson is 126.5 GeV, but it is possible that one particle gave both values.Oops on my part then. I'm sure the report I read ealier said the number I gave above. The official release doesn't have an exact number, but I'm sure that a technical paper will pop up on arxiv soon that will be more informative.
If they found a second particle, that would be quite interesting too.
I suppose it wouldn't be unprecedented for the Higgs field to have more than one Boson, since the Weak interaction already has 3 (W+, W- and Z), with slightly different masses.

