Rumours of a discovery of the Higgs boson at Fermilab's Tevatron collider appear to be unfounded.
Last week, the blogger and physicist Tommaso Dorigo sparked speculation over an imminent announcement of a "three-sigma" signal of the elusive Higgs particle. Three-sigma refers to the statistical certainty of the result - a 99.7 per cent likelihood that the measurement is accurate. However, the errors and fluctuations in particle collisions are high enough that a five-sigma signal is necessary to claim a discovery.
At the International Workshop on the Interconnection between Particle Physics and Cosmology 2010 meeting in Turin, Italy, physicist Simona Rolli told New Scientist that she and colleagues on Tevatron experiments were puzzled at where Dorigo's rumour came from - they haven't heard any talk about a Higgs signal.
Rolli speculates that the rumour may have emerged from continued excitement over a three-sigma signal on a completely different finding: a clue about why the universe is composed of more matter rather than antimatter, initially announced in May.
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