This morning, the spokespeople for the two main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, gave talks on their teams' latest results in the search for the Higgs boson. As expected, the results were a bit ambiguous, as the signals that are consistent with the presence of the Higgs didn't rise much above two standard deviations away from background noise. But the details were even more confusing. Although both teams see signals in roughly the same area, CMS sees two of them, and appears to exclude the area where ATLAS' signal peaks.

The Higgs boson is predicted to be the last undetected particle of the Standard Model. It's a necessary outcome of the Higgs field, which provides the other particles mass. There are other ways of producing a Higgs field (and other ways of having a Higgs-like particle), but all of these require extensive modification of the Standard Model. Since the Standard Model works extremely well, researchers have been searching for the expected Higgs particle; the LHC was designed in part to be able to find it.

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