## Wednesday, 4 July 2012

### Higgsmania!

CMS and ATLAS both now have conclusive evidence of a Higgs-like particle with a mass of around $125-127$ GeV; this will be covered all over the internet, so I won't go into details here. I will say that it's a thrilling moment, and that we all eagerly await more data, to elucidate the detailed properties of this particle.

But the main reason for this post is to publicly congratulate everybody involved in this work. There are (at least) two distinct groups of people to highlight:

• The LHC is an extraordinary machine, and has been performing phenomenally well; this discovery is only possible now because the machine has delivered so much integrated luminosity so quickly. It represents an unparallelled engineering achievement, so congratulations to the team who have worked so hard to get it to this stage.

## Tuesday, 3 July 2012

As has already been discussed extensively by many bloggers (including Jester, Tommaso, Shaun, and especially Peter Woit), CERN are holding a special seminar and press conference tomorrow morning, to announce the latest results on the hunt for the Higgs boson. It is widely rumoured that the evidence of a $\sim 125$ GeV Higgs from last year has strengthened to the point of being conclusive.