John Conway goes after the Higgs

Several days ago, we mentioned the 2 sigma signal for a possible MSSM Higgs at 160 GeV. John Conway whose favorite lepton is tau and who has been searching for the Higgs for 20 years wrote an exciting two-part novel about their search:

• Bump hunting 1
• Bump hunting 2
• Bump hunting 3 (not exciting)
  
• RealAudio Interview (Ireland)
• Bump hunting (redux): the bump is gone in Oct 2007

Figure 1: A simple version of the parameter space of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). The x-axis is the mass of the CP-odd Higgs boson, the y-axis is tan(beta), essentially the ratio of expectation values of the two Higgs scalars in the model. The broader purple region (dark+light) is the region they expected to exclude. However, the bump only allowed them to exclude the dark purple region. Analogously, LEP 2 at CERN (defunct) has excluded the blue region - in a somewhat complementary fashion to the Fermilab.




D0 is probably getting a deficit of events where John Conway and CDF have an excess which would strongly indicate that the bump is a fluke. It is however not impossible that the Tevatron discovers what looks like a supersymmetric Higgs before the LHC once they have more data.