Discovery

So.  The LHC has found something.

Watching the webcast now, CMS claims 5 sigma combining the diphoton and ZZ channels.  It looks very compelling.

Of course, there's some way to go to confirm that what's seen is actually the Higgs.  But all the different decay channels seem to match up as expected, within the errors.  It looks very Standard Model like.

Update: Nothing in ditau.  That might be interesting.

Update 2:  ATLAS comes in with 5 sigma excesses in the same channels, at the same points.  That's pretty much unequivocal.

The biggest thing missing is Higgs to WW.  Neither experiment saw much of an excess there, and that's the key to proving the new state is the Higgs, in that it is responsible for giving mass to the W and Z bosons.  Then, a longer period of measuring the fermionic branching ratios, and maybe the total width in the diphoton and ZZ channels.

Still, I think we can safely predict Nobels for the collaborations and/or Peter Higgs this year.