A new year with new energy and new luminosities: 2012 holds the promise to close the question on the existence (or absence) of a Standard Model Higgs boson.

CMS has presented a rich variety of results at the Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories sessions of the Rencontres de Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy.

“If you remember, Mark Twain once said, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ If you use statistics in an improper way, you could get pretty much any result,” says Greg Landsberg, CMS’s new physics coordinator.

On 10^th January, a delegation from Serbia, led by President Boris Tadic, arrived at CERN to sign the agreement that would grant Serbia associate membership to CERN, as a step towards full membership.

CERN, 13th December 2011

Science is closing in on the most elusive thing in the Universe.

Why would I care about the Higgs boson?

At about half-past five in the evening on Sunday, 30^th October, an e-mail from Run Coordination to the CMS collaboration said:

By combining their data ATLAS and CMS increase their sensitivity in the Higgs boson search

The hunt for the Higgs particle is well ahead of schedule, say researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Earlier this year they said they would either discover the Higgs or confirm it does not exist by the end of 2012.

The latest results from the Large Hadron Collider serve as a reality check for expectations that radical scientific discoveries are just around the corner. A month ago, folks were buzzing about prospects that the elusive Higgs boson might soon be found.

The Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in all of physics, is proving tougher to find than physicists had hoped. [...]

The Higgs boson is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been seen by experiments. It helps explain how elementary particles acquire mass. If the Higgs boson exists it will be produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider say a signal that suggested they might have seen "hints" of the long-sought Higgs boson particle has weakened. [...]

Ripples of excitement swept through the physics community last month when Cern scientists reported what looked like glimpses of the long-sought Higgs boson. But the hopes have been dashed as it was revealed that the tantalising hints had all but faded away. [ ... ]

The current data from the LHC show an effect which might, or might not, be the first indication of the presence of a Higgs boson. Most of this effect is due to the number of pairs of W bosons which are being produced in proton-proton collisions.

This is a well-written piece exploring the need for more data and what possible interpretations there could be: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2011/aug/06/1

The CMS collaboration is presenting its latest results this week at the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics, held in Grenoble, France.

The CMS Collaboration at CERN released a paper today entitled "First Measurement of W⁺W⁻ Production and Search for Higgs Boson in pp Collisions at √s = 7 TeV". The paper is the first produced by CMS that includes searches for the Higgs boson at the LHC.