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Thursday, January 18, 2007

W Boson, and Higgs Just Around the Corner?

Well, I threatened to blog about this, and now I am. Before I do I want to say people should consider taking a look at Science Daily every once and a while since they stay on top of really cool recent physics being published.

With that said, according to the report by Science Daily:
Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced the world's most precise measurement by a single experiment of the mass of the W boson, the carrier of the weak nuclear force and a key parameter of the Standard Model of particles and forces. The new W-mass value leads to an estimate for the mass of the yet-undiscovered Higgs boson that is lighter than previously predicted, in principle making observation of this elusive particle more likely by experiments at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab. Scientists working at the Collider Detector at Fermilab measured the mass of the W boson to be 80,413 +/- 48 MeV/c2, determining the particle's mass with a precision of 0.06 percent.
What is so interesting to me is this suggests the Higgs Boson may be light enough to be detected by FermiLab! This also means the needed energy level is likely to be in the crosshairs of CERN. Just any day now and we will be overturning cars in the streets over some monumental news.

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