from http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/Releases00/PR08.00ELEPRundelay.html
"However, the topology of these events is also compatible with originating from other known standard model processes. As a consequence, it is at present impossible either to rule out or confirm the existence of a 114-115 GeV Higgs boson."
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check out the 4-jet candidates (114-115 GeV):
http://alephwww.cern.ch/ALPUB/seminar/wds/dali.html
http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/Releases00/Hqq2000_Delphi.jpg
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an amusing cartoon which actually almost makes a point -- self-oscillation of Higgs field to "make" Higgs boson vs. Higgs-particle interactions to produce mass of particles):
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from AIP:
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 502 September 14, 2000 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
AN INTRIGUING HINT OF THE HIGGS BOSON in collider data at the LEP accelerator at CERN has prompted officials there to extend the running period of the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider by at least a month, instead of turning it off now to make way for the building of the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC, a proton- colliding machine to be housed in the same deep tunnel as LEP). CERN decided today that the high energy electron-positron collisions at LEP will continue, the better to supplement the meager, but potentially crucial, evidence for the Higgs boson, the particle widely thought to be responsible for endowing other known particles with mass. What happens at LEP, in effect, is that a lot of energy squeezed into a very tiny volume almost instantly rematerializes in the form of new particles. Theorists have said that in some collisions a Higgs boson (h) might be produced back to back with a Z boson, one of the carriers of the weak force and itself the object of a dramatic particle hunt at CERN 20 years ago. In these rare events, both h and Z are expected to decay quickly into two sprays, or jets, of particles. One tactic then is to search 4-jet events for signs that the combined mass of two jets at a special energy seems to stand out above pedestrian "background" events in which no true exotic particle had been produced. What has caught LEP physicists' attention is just such an enhancement, at a mass around 114 GeV/c^2. The enhancement is not statistically significant enough for CERN to claim a discovery yet, even when all four detector groups combine their data, but sufficient to cause excitement since the Higgs is perhaps the most sought after particle in all of high energy physics. The LEP extension is not expected to cause much of a delay in LHC construction. (Some websites: http://press.web.cern.ch ; http://opal.web.cern.ch/Opal/ ; http://alephwww.cern.ch/WWW/ )
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les schaffer
