The good folks at the LHC have not been shy about sharing their results. Indeed, at the end of last year, the bigwigs at CERN called a press conference to announce that they hadn't found the Higgs boson yet, but they were starting to see some signals that might be the Higgs. If only all of us in research could get away with progress reports like that.

OK, that was a very cynical opening to a story that shows the benefits of such openness. The signal seen by the LHC's CMS and ATLAS detectors hinted at a Higgs Boson with a mass in the range of 124-126GeV. But buried in the details are some numbers that, if they hold up, will be impossible to accommodate in the standard model of physics. What does any good theoretical physicist do in these circumstances? Plug the numbers into their favorite model to see if it is still in the running. Something that could not be done had CERN not been so open about its preliminary results.

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We're only about a week away from restarting the LHC, but the physics community is still analyzing data generated by earlier runs of that collider and the Tevatron. Their latest results were presented at a physics meeting in Italy this week. The biggest news is probably the fact that the full analysis of Tevatron data turns out to be consistent with the presence of the Higgs where early indications from the LHC say it's likely to be. The LHC data, however, shows a slightly reduced signal, and the two detectors are still placing it at slightly different masses.

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Last week, the people running the LHC laid out plans for its 2012 schedule. In announcing the results of the 2011 run, physicists indicated that they would have enough data by the end of this year to know whether the Higgs boson exists at around 125GeV, where a tantalizing signal had been spotted. To make sure this comes to pass, the people running the LHC have laid out a schedule that will see the machine pump out three times as many collisions this year as it did in the one just passed. They'll also boost the energy slightly before sending the collider into an extended shutdown that will start next winter.

A catastrophic failure early in the LHC's history revealed a flaw in some of the superconducting hardware that helps keep the protons on track as they circle the accelerator. To compensate, the accelerator has been running with each beam at 3.5TeV (for a combined energy of 7TeV), half its design energy; an extended break would be required to replace the faulty hardware. At the reduced energy, however, the LHC has outperformed most people's expectations, placing a definitive answer on the Higgs within reach. That prospect has caused the LHC management to revise some of its plans in the expectation that the Higgs can be discovered or ruled out before the extended shutdown.

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Tomorrow, CERN will be webcasting a talk on the latest results in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to provide other particles with mass. The director of CERN has gone on record as saying there won't be any announcement that we've definitively discovered the Higgs, nor will there be any statement indicating that we've completely ruled out its existence. Still, expectations are high that we'll find some signal indicating the Higgs is probably at a specific mass—rumors have it near either 120 or 140GeV.

Even as the webcast proceeds, science writers everywhere will be scrambling to explain the results. We thought we'd get a jump on things and give you an explanation of what exactly the scientists at the LHC's two general-purpose detectors, ATLAS and CMS, are looking for, and why it's so hard to be certain about what they've seen.

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