There are a lot of articles being posted in the wake of a CERN announcement that

Question

There are a lot of articles being posted in the wake of a CERN announcement that they have not observed the Higgs boson in the range of energies so far searched (between 145 and 466 billion eV), e.g. this Scientific American blog post.

How can this be? Wasn't the existence of the Higgs an almost foregone conclusion. Can someone who looked at the details at CERN explain if they are hoping to run the LHC for more time to find it, or is the search becoming hopeless (or perhaps its energy was estimated wrong).

Explanation / Answer

I wouldn't call the existence of the Higgs boson a foregone conclusion. It got people excited because we have a very elegant theory that predicts pretty much everything else correctly, and also predicts the existence of a Higgs boson, but the theory could certainly be wrong. Elegance is no guarantee of success.

Anyway, I recently made a blog post about that that you might want to read. The gist of it is that the signal observed by the LHC detectors - in other words, the difference between what they actually saw and what they expected to see - has been getting smaller the more data they collect, over the past month or so. But it's too soon to say anything with certainty. The LHC will continue running, and if the Higgs boson is there to be discovered, they hope to do so by the end of this year. Otherwise, they expect to be able to exclude it by the end of next year.

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