Some Current Scenarios for the Higgs Boson Search

So far, the Tevatron search has excluded at the 95% confidence level (that is, at better than one-in-twenty odds) the region between 160 and 170 GeV of Higgs boson masses.

Together with previous inputs, this creates a suggestive convergence of indirect information and direct limits, which seems to force us to place our chips in the region between 115 and 150 GeV as the most probable hiding spot of the phantomatic particle.

If a Higgs of 150 GeV is what Nature chose for our Universe, by combining their 7/fb datasets CDF and DZERO would have a 30% to 65% chance to observe an excess at the 2-sigma level, 3-sigma would be less likely, but possible if a positive fluctuation of the data occurred; 1-sigma would similarly be possible.

The Large Hadron Collider does not look like it will be operating at a significant level for the search for the Higgs Boson until very late in 2010 or into 2011.