Re:Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
by Devilboy on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @03:56AM
(#4198225)
Could we combine the ATLAS results to get over the 5 sigma mark?
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It's possible to combine the data and get a higer significance. AFAIK, Officially, CERN doesn't do these combinations, but independent people do. See here:
Re:Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
by mattheww on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @04:25AM
(#4198331)
CMS and ATLAS will do an official combination. For example, it was done for 2011: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.1488.
This paper combines different channels from CMS, but not CMS and ATLAS.
"In this Letter, we report on the combination of Higgs boson searches carried out in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7 TeV using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC. ... Combined results are reported from searches for the SM Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7TeV in five Higgs boson decay modes: gg, bb, tt, WW, and ZZ."
Re:Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
by karpathy on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @04:15AM
(#4198290)
Any idea about what prevents them from combining the data?
Re:Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
by DeepDuh on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @04:28AM
(#4198338)
Those two detectors are attached to the same accelerator, right? My guess is they don't because they cannot guarantee the results to be independent from each other?
Re:Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
by zbyszek on Wednesday July 04, 2012 @08:15AM
(#4199060)
That's about it. See also
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/28/why-we-shouldnt-com...