A hint of the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the standard model of particle physics, has been found in data collected by the Tevatron, the now-shuttered U.S. particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill.
While not statistically significant, the indications announced on March 7 at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, are consistent with 2011 reports of a possible standard model Higgs particle with a mass of around 125 GeV from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
Researchers on the Tevatron see an excess of events produced in the machine's proton-antiproton collisions that could be caused by a Higgs with a mass between 117 and 131 GeV. The excess had a statistical significance of 2.6 sigma, meaning there is about a 0.5 percent probability that the result is due to chance.
This is the result of a combined analysis on data from both Tevatron experiments, D0 and the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF).
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