Rumors swirled today that data may have been found that supports the Higgs boson at ~126 GeV. Reliable sources have speculated the data will show a certainty, that something’s there, to about 4.2 sigma, the threshold for official detection is 5 sigma, but that only triggers many rounds of attempted confirmation. I’m told that is probably the gist of what CERN will discuss, full statement below:

(CERN) — A seminar will be held at CERN on 13 December at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.

The seminar begins at 14:00 CET. At 16:30 CET CERN management and representatives of the two experiments will be available to take questions from the media. The auditorium in which the seminar will be held is reserved for CERN personnel and researchers from the laboratory’s user community, but a video stream will be relayed to another auditorium in which scientists will be on hand to answer questions. Journalists wishing to attend should register with the CERN Press Office. Both the seminar and the following Q&A will be webcast. Journalists following the webcast may submit questions through Twitter using the hashtag #Higgsupdate.

Dates: 13 December 2011 (11:00-18:30)
Timezone: Europe/Zurich
Location: CERN

Room: Filtration Plant

I edited the title on this from something clumsier, and that I’ve already forgotten — DS