Searching for the Higgs Boson

New and highly anticipated results from the search for the elusive Higgs particle were revealed on December 13 at a special seminar at CERN. The Higgs boson stands as the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions to have thus far not been observed. It plays a key role in the Standard Model, as it gives mass to other fundamental particles, such as the electrons and quarks that comprise normal matter. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collides proton beams at world record center-of-mass energies (7 TeV) and luminosities, with the two main experiments, ATLAS and CMS, collecting data since Spring 2010. Profs. Brau, Dallapiccola and Willocq participate in the ATLAS collaboration, whose latest results show a tantalizing excess of events in data for a mass region of the Higgs that is theoretically preferred, 115-130 GeV, consistent with an excess of events observed by the independent, competing experiment CMS (115-127 GeV). At 95% confidence level, a Higgs particle with mass in the range 127-600 GeV has now been ruled out.