I just took out the hard drives and took them with me on the plane. Everything was fine when it finally arrived. The movers just boxed up the computers like everything else. I've done this twice now...

The new number is +-15 MeV including the LEP measurements. +-17 is just the Tevatron.

The key is on the left... yellow is tracker hits (charged particles only), red electromagnetic calorimeter deposits (could be anything, but electrons and photons leave larger deposits as they should stop), blue is hadronic calorimeter depoits (anything not stopped in the electromagnetic calorimeter, so probably not electrons of photons). Muons will show up in all these detectors are reach the other muon systems.

The beam isn't shown, but the estimated primary vertex is (where the two protons collided).

Yes it can be run at lower energies, and at first, it will have to until the accelerator experts get a feel for how well the magnets perform. In the long run there is no point to running it at lower energies-- i.e., why spend more money to build a machine that does the same thing as the Tevatron?

No, there's no guarantee a *Standard Model* Higgs Boson (which is what this search is) even exists. We know some mechanism exists for the symmetry that's broken between the Electromagnetic and Weak forces, but that doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of a standard model Higgs.

Its not a matter of "some thinking"-- the backgrounds that swamp a Higgs signal for a low mass Higgs are simply more prevalent at the energies of the LHC. The LHC makes up for that by being able to accumulate much more data than the Tevatron in a shorter amount of time. Of course, up to probably early next year, we at the Tevatron are in a superior position in that any data is greater than the zero the LHC will have accumulated.

I work on CMS, one of the six experiments. We have about 1.6PB of disk in the CERN storage system and 4PB of tape. I don't know about the other experiments. We do keep a copy of the initial data at CERN as well as at least one other site, tapes and disks do break and we don't want to lose the data.

1) I'm assuming the members of the court have either not played God of War, not read the Odyssey, or both
2) I find the idea of considering one brief scene of polygonal breasts to be the most damaging aspect of God of War with regards to children... shocking, quite frankly.