Fermilab races to find the Higgs Boson as CERN prepares for data overload

Various : 30 feet under Chicago’s suburbs, the Tevatron is colliding protons and antiprotons, smashing beams together at energies of up to 1.8 TeV (the acronym that gave the Tevatron its name). The Tevatron will soon be replaced by CERN’s 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider that should easily see the Higgs Boson, one of the founding blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. But rumors are flying around that the Tevatron’s DZero detector has seen something interesting, maybe a fleeting hint of the Higgs Boson, something interesting enough to extend operations into 2009 and maybe into 2010. “It’s a good story now for physics,” Pier Oddone, Fermilab’s director, told MSNBC’s Alan Boyle last week . John Ellis for one, is not so sure that the Tevatron will see the Higgs, as he stated in a recent Nature article . Meanwhile CERN is preparing for the vast qualities of data the LHC will produce when it starts engineering trials next year. . The data generated during the project is expected to dwarf every other scientific experiment in history, amounting to 15 petabytes a year. Chris Mellor at Techworld magazine looks at how CERN will manage and analyze the vast qualities of data produced. There are also rumors flying around that experiments with the LHC will be delayed until 2009, one year later than currently scheduled due to engineering difficulties.