IT SEEMS the gloves are off in the race to find the Higgs boson.
Teams at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have recently issued a spate of bold announcements about their search for the Higgs, which is thought to give other particles mass. For example, they claim that the Tevatron has a 50:50 chance of finding the particle.
Some researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, due to power up later this year, have apparently had enough. In a talk at CERN last week, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich of exaggerating their prospects, arguing that the sensitivity of their machine has yet to match predictions. Tevatron’s search for the Higgs “was, is and remains hopeless”, Dittmar says.
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CERN’s spokesman James Gillies stresses that the rivalry between the Tevatron and LHC is good-natured. “They’ve got press release friendly recently, but they’ve had some good stuff to report,” he says. Dittmar’s presentation was his personal view, he adds.
“The rivalry between researchers at the Tevatron and LHC over the Higgs boson is good-natured”
Some researchers at the Tevatron have angrily disputed Dittmar’s claims. Tommaso Dorigo at the University of Padua, Italy, was in the audience during the talk. “I felt I was wasting my time listening to him,” he wrote on his blog .