The LHC, the Tevatron, and the Higgs Boson

A few weeks back I wrote about the remarkable milestones passed by the Tevatron and LHC, and prognosticated that if there was ever a time when new discoveries could come out rapidly, this was it, especially for the LHC experiments analyzing a data sample 30 times larger than the previous one. The result? Nature is being coy - in basically every new particle search for new particles and phenomena conducted by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, we see naught but eerie agreement with the predictions for ordinary standard model background. A huge raft of results has been presented at two large international conferences: the annual European Physical Society meeting on high energy physics in Grenoble, France, and the Particles and Nuclei International Conference (PANIC11) at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I presented the CMS results on the searches for the Higgs boson at the latter on Tuesday...more on ...