The femtobarn is a unit of area. The inverse femtobarn is basically saying the number of interactions "per femtobarn". A higher value means more interactions are occurring.
When you fire a beam of particles at something, or another stream of particles then you usually want interactions to happen. Some particles miss, some interact and some are moving too past and fly right by. There is an optimum energy where the most particle interactions occur. If you plot out the interaction rates then you usually get a bell curve. This is known as the excitation function for that interaction.
> The significance is typically quoted as σ, or a number of standard deviations of the normal distribution. In particle physics, a significance of 3σ is referred to as evidence, while 5σ is referred to as an observation, corresponding to the probability of a statistical fluctuation from the background of less than 1 in a million.
So, no one has ever observed the particle, and the "observation" is in actuality not an observation. Just a "less than one in a million" chance fluctuation from the background noise. Which doesn't sound very convincing to me if you need to run the experiment millions of times to produce the output.
So you don't know statistics nor how observations are made in particle physics... Do you think that we collect these things in a jar and make a picture? Of course you look for a signal on top of a background, after modelling it within a control region and then unblinding with data somewhere else, and of course you compare signal against a Monte Carlo simulation because there's no other way to do this. You're welcome to suggest 10,000 particle physicists your ideas about how to find particles with lifetimes of 10^-22 s and a production cross section of 57 pb. I don't understand what makes people that have never opened an actual book about this, nor stepped into a lab, entitled to think they know better than professionals working their asses out what they're talking about.
Well, one of the problems, for instance, is that experiments like this are basically un-peer-reviewable. Who has the money to build another LHC? So it's hard for others to review the work done and thus, basically we all have to trust ONE team of scientists on this.
But the particle scientists, in this for science and for them rather peculiar position, don't take proper care at all to explain their findings or their theories, which is obviously made harder with the absence of pictures from experiments like we used to have in particle physics. They just anounce "we've found the Higgs!", throw a party and ask everybody to believe them.
The theories of particle physics are not really understandable unless you choose to study them very hard for a couple of years, and for sure the amount of theory needed to understand the experiments at LHC is staggering. I'm just a layman in this regard, and I will probably never understand the theories you guys do.
So I'm not a scientist, but I am pretty well versed in politics, and I can tell you from a political view there's two options: you either found the Higgs or you didn't. If you did, you'd be very happy and publishing your results. If you didn't, you'd also be happily publishing results because for all 10,000 of you it'd be career suicide to admit that y'all just spent 15 billion euros to build a device that didn't give the expected results.
The amount of anger and disdain displayed by scientists in this field towards anyone asking genuine questions is starting to look like other fields where "the science is settled".
The thing is you haven't asked anything, you've made your own assumptions and presented them as facts. There is a single accelerator that provides the proton beams: the LHC, and there are two independently designed and built huge main detectors where collisions happen and two independent collaborations, one for each, that actually make the measurements and then analyze the data of just theirs. At the LHC there's ATLAS and CMS, they don't share any data nor staff, and both of them have found the Higgs. Once they publish their results, they are statistically combined so you have a single value for whatever property at the PDG. This is how it's done, for obvious scientific-method-done-right reasons, at CERN at least since 1978 with UA1 and UA2. But you're not interested in what's really going on, because you're well versed in politics AKA bullshit, so you can't even grasp that there are competent people actually doing their job, with stellar standards let me add, and I know because I've seen a lot of bullshit in action almost everywhere in this fake it until you make it society we're building so merrily, but not there. You wouldn't believe it, people actually working? surely they're scamming us honest maligners, eh?
I left out a relevant factoid. It's almost impossible for a scientist to become CERN staff, they mostly hire engineers. There are about 25 physicists at the Theory division and a few more scattered around with a fellowship. Usually scientists are paid by universities or investigation institutes from all around the world. Countries pay their contribution to the budget because it's not a very good idea for your R&D to miss it.
You make it sound like there is money "lost". The dollars that are spent end up in the economy and go in the development of new materials and technologies that otherwise wouldn't have been developed. Whether there is a direct benefit to humanity of finding the fundamental laws of physics is another matter, but the way towards that has always been very fruitful.
E.g., enjoy your life-saving MRI? Thank research physicists.
An often quoted figure, or range of figures, is that the U.S. space program has, per dollar invested, produced between 5 and 10 dollars of returns in commercial technology. I don't mean rockets and such. I mean things used in the everyday world around us.
Oh, and a bit further afield from traditional physics, most of the novel drug discovery in the U.S. is developed with public dollars, not pharmaceutical dollars. Pharmaceutical companies convert (some) discoveries to commercial products, spending more money on later series trials and on marketing, than on any original research.
And, many drugs were the results of "mistakes". Not what the researchers were targeting.
You do research to learn novel things. If you already knew what your result would be, well...
(I could jest, then you'd be a theoretician.)
P.S. Let me also put it this way: You do research also to learn how to learn those things. Building new equipment, procedures, and understanding. And a lot of those pay off repeatedly, regardless of the particular result of the original research topic.
>You make it sound like there is money "lost". The dollars that are spent end up in the economy
This trickle down economics argument was used commonly in the Reagan era, and could be heard frequently in the 90s in conservative media.
While it is correct that the money does not disappear (which in theory would generally just be a transfer of wealth too all money holders), the problem with the argumenr is that it is wilfully ignorant of the introductory economics lesson of 'guns vs butter,' as well as other lesons.
Yes the money 'stays in the economy,' but what is it buying/producing? Someone just replied to me in another thread about the propensity to which Wall St bankers buy prostitutes and drugs. Leaders have bought us wars and domestic surveillance.
An arguable reason to spend on basic science would have to do with money multipliers and a great reason would be return on technological investment, which you touched on.
TL;DR good arguments exist for this spending, but probably not the trickle down economics one
You are also discounting serendipitous advances that can happen due to the techniques and technology developed to find the Higgs boson.
Here is one example: using the mathematical algorithms designed for the detectors for ATLAS and using it to recover the recordings stored on old wax cylinders. [1]
I'm assuming that the unit being discussed here is inverse femtobarns–but I don't know what to make of this number. Is high? Low? "Good"?