the elusive Higgs boson

All theorized particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics has been found except the Higgs boson. A confirmation of the existence of this particle will complete the theoretical description of over half a century of experimental and theoretical particle physics work. Yesterday, the combined data from the ATLAS (4.9 fb-1) and CMS experiments were shown in a public seminar from CERN hinting that the Higgs exists with a mass of about 126GeV(as a comparison, the mass of the proton is 0.938GeV).

Invariant mass distribution for the inclusive data sample, overlaid with the sum of the background-only fits in different categories described in Sections 3 and 4 in the ATLAS paper and the signal expectation for a mass hypothesis of 120 GeV corresponding to the SM cross section. The figure below displays the residual of the data with respect to the background-only fit sum. Source: ATLAS Collaboration

 As shown in the figure above, the dotted lines show how the Higgs would modify the Standard Model background.  It is a very minor modification so it requires high sensitivity of the detector.

The observed and expected 95% confidence level limits, normalised to the SM Higgs boson cross sections, as a function of the hypothesized Higgs boson mass. Source: ATLAS Collaboration.

We only see a 3.6σ(ATLAS) and 2.6σ(CMS) above the expected SM background for the Higgs mass of 126GeV in the figure above.  A 5σ significance is required to claim a discovery.

(to answer Mr. Hawkin's question) Do I want the Higgs to exist? Well, its kind of nice to have a theory being proven correct by experiment especially it involved the hard work of many generations of physicists.  Having the Higgs to exist at the low mass region of 115-150GeV would also be nice.  There will be other problems that physicists could work on and more work for me to do, supersymmetry maybe?

On the other hand, no Higgs means a totally different theory to explain where mass comes from.  Although there are already many theories like Technicolor or Higgless SM models, we will always have more work to do.