DIY Higgs discovery

Make your own Brazil band. (Courtesy: Phillip Gibbs)

By Hamish Johnston

The Large Hadron Collider is up and running at a collision energy of 8 TeV and – barring any disasters – it looks as if it may well give us a mass for the Higgs boson by the end of the year.

But why wait for the official pronouncement from CERN when you can aggregate all the latest measurements yourself using the handy “viXra unofficial Higgs combination Java applet”, which you can download here

The dashboard-style interface shows you the classic “Brazil band” plot and allows you to fiddle around with how data from different experiments are combined. The default setting is the “unofficial” combination used by viXra blogger Phillip Gibbs, but you can also use the “official” CERN settings, or even choose your own.

Now there’s no need to wait for the man with the beard to tell you when to break out the champagne – you can make that decision yourself.