I had an article in Slate today, about a rumor making the rounds of physics departments (and now physics blogs) these past few weeks. Details not in the article: the rumor says that a new particle has been found at the Tevatron, with a mass of 180 GeV, which is on the heavy side for the standard Higgs but not out of the allowed range. It also says that the excess (ie. the number of hits on the particle detector above what was expected) is 5 standards of deviation in magnitude. This is the usual standard for a new particle (the bumps talked about previously were more like 3 standards of deviation). The excess is apparently occurring in the bottom quark channel of the D0 experiment. Some people have taken this to mean that the new particle is *not* the Standard Model Higgs, which would probably decay to W bosons if it were really 180 GeV. But of course, there’s no *real* data available, and so it isn’t clear what the new particle’s decay chain really is, and most people still speculate that it is, indeed, the Higgs.

The point of the article, though, is only partially about the rumor. I conceived of it more as a media watch type story: Dennis Overbye and Elizabeth Kolbert had stories in early May in the New York Times and the New Yorker (respectively) which emphasized the hunt for the Higgs, while in fact, finding the Higgs would mean that particle physics would have no idea what to do next. It would be the ultimate disaster (essentially guaranteeing John H.’s predictions in The End of Science) for the field. When Nima Arkani-Hamed (my old adviser at Harvard, and star of both of the articles) talks about the Higgs being just the beginning, he’s being sloppy with language: the Higgs would be the end. Something Higgs-like (a supersymmetric Higgs, rather than a Standard Model Higgs, for instance; a composite Higgs, or a “little Higgs”), rather than the simple scalar boson that Weinberg canonized in the Standard Model, would be “just the beginning,” because then we could expect to find sparticles, or something even cooler. Nima, as a particle phenomenologist and the originator of some of the little Higgs theories (the “Littlest Higgs,” in fact), of course hopes that something closer to his own predictions will be found. A 180 GeV Higgs, if the decay chain is right, could come close to eliminating the chances of that happening.

One rather interesting quirk about the story: I originally heard about the rumor from a friend at Stanford’s Facebook status message. After that, I sent some emails and made a few phone calls, and found out more details (as well as some variations). And then the rumor made it into the physics blogosphere, which clarified something (and also introduced all sorts of new variations). I would expect D0 to publish in the next few weeks, if there’s anything to publish about. I can’t wait.

And I should say: I emphasize the European commitment to the LHC in the article. Of course, it’s been a group project, and many, many American physicists have contributed to the LHC, in the design, in model building, and in building the experimental apparatus that will use the accelerator. But in terms of actually building the thing, the US has contributed about 6% of total funds, whereas the UK, Germany, and France have contributed a total of about 60%.

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