Progress in Physics: CMS Looking Back & Moriond Higgs Update

In Prespacetime Journal 4(2), Physicist, Philip Gibbs reflected on CMS: The collaborations like to make big statements about how they do their analysis blind. This is supposed to mean that they don’t look at the results until they have fixed the parameters of the analysis so that they cannot introduce any bias. From a CMS video, we can see what this really means in practice. They unblind the data as an early check then they “re-blind” it while they adjust the analysis. They unblind it again two weeks later with just 30% more data added. This is not quite in the spirit of how blind analysis is meant to work. Luckily the signal is so clear that it is indisputable in any case. For details see here or viXra Log.

Philip Gibbs also has an excellent piece "Moriond Higgs Update" at viXra Log: The latest Higgs updates are now being presented at Moriond. CMS have kicked off this morning with a presentation of bosonic decays including WW and ZZ but still not including the important diphoton channel. The full LHC run 1 dataset is now being used including 19.6/fb at 8 TeV. For details, see here.