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5 sigma — 99.9999% certainty, or more correctly a 0.00001% chance that you have made a faulty observation — is the threshold for an observation to be labeled a scientific discovery. CERN crossed the 5 sigma threshold this summer. At 7 sigma, both the CMS and ATLAS teams are reporting that there’s only a 0.0000000001% chance that they haven’t found a Higgs-like particle.
Over the last few months you may have noticed the use of the phrase “Higgs-like,” rather than “Higgs boson.” This is because CERN and the scientific community can’t be certain that they’ve actually found the Higgs boson — all they know is that they’ve found a particle, with a mass of around 125 GeV, that behaves as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. With its discovery now completely and utterly confirmed, further analysis (due in 2013) will now focus on the particle’s spin, and other properties. Eventually, perhaps after upgrades are completed and the LHC turns back on in 2015, the particle will be officially announced as the Higgs boson (or not, which would be much more interesting).
In other news, CERN says that it has observed the decay of the Bs meson (strange B meson) into two muons. Apparently this is one of the rarest processes ever observed in particle physics, which means it’s a good chance that it could lead to new science.
