# How do they know they found a Higgs-Boson? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 15, 2013, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982 "2013-03-15T04:23:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2013, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982/21 "2013-03-16T00:29:01Z")
It’s not just a philosophical exercise, though, since something similar has already happened. Back last century, a fellow named Yukawa thought that he could at least roughly explain the strong nuclear force, using a new particle that he called the meson. He predicted that it should have a certain mass and charge, and the experimentalists went and looked for it. Sure enough, they found a charged particle with about that mass, and declared it to be Yukawa’s meson. But then, after further experimentation, it turned out that this new particle, despite having about the right mass and charge, had the wrong spin, and thus couldn’t possibly be the right one. A bit more searching, and they found _another_ new particle (now called the pion), with slightly more mass and the correct spin, which did fit into Yukawa’s theory, and re-named the other particle the “muon” (leading Rabi to comment “Who ordered that?”). ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2013, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982/22 "2013-03-16T01:36:48Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > It reminds me of the claim that Shakespeare’s play were written by another man named William Shakespeare. Excellent. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2013, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982/23 "2013-03-16T02:00:51Z")
> [@AndyLee](#): > > The cynic in me says when you spend billions of dollars to look for somethng you better find it. LOL Yeah, but. There is a long and gigantic history of experiments not finding what they are looking for. Many, many more experiments have failed publicly than have succeeded. That’s why the few successes get the Nobel Prizes. I think you were joking, but given that there’s a whole crowd of idiots out there who say things like global warning is just a conspiracy of scientists wanting grant money any statement like this has to be stomped on, hard and fast. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2013, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982/24 "2013-03-16T08:49:58Z")
> [@Pasta](#): > > If you want a graphic, you could see p. 13 of [this PDF set of slides](http://moriond.in2p3.fr/QCD/2013/ThursdayMorning/Whitbeck.pdf) that the CMS collaboration presented yesterday. On that page, the plot on the right shows the measurement and error bar for the rate of the Higgs decaying to various things. The plot is scaled such that the Standard Model predicts 1 on the horizontal axis for a simple Higgs. So I guess that’s pretty much it with respect to the excess in the digamma channel, and new physics from that? The excess seems to have steadily gone down for both ATLAS and CMS, which makes it seem all the more likely that it was just a statistical fluke… ---
**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2013, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982/25 "2013-03-16T11:58:13Z")
I was wondering what the difference between untagged and VBF tagged for digamma was. I found [this page](http://www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/cms/physics/HIGGS/maiko_analysis.html), which seems fairly readable, so I thought I’d drop the link here. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-they-know-they-found-a-higgs-boson/652982.md?page=1)