A member of the CMS collaboration has leaked the information that on July 4th (see the counter in the sidebar), the discovery of the Higgs boson will be accompanied by the information that the cross section for its production will have been measured with the 30% error margin.
While this error may look large, it doesn't mean that the significance of the discovery is only 3 sigma. In reality, the large uncertainty of the cross section may be partly if not mostly explained by the nonzero background events' cross section, its uncertainty, and the uncertainty of the overall luminosity of the LHC. One may roughly estimate that 30% of the Higgs cross section (which is comparable to 20 picobarns) is less than 20% of the total cross section for the Higgs and (i.e. plus) the background events which is why one is more than 5-sigma certain that the Higgs contribution is nonzero.
I won't tell you the last name of the person who leaked this information, in a pretty obvious way, because this could cause some trouble to Tommaso. :-) I think that he should get a confirmation from his psychiatrist that he just can't resist to leak these things – and then he should defend himself at the CMS by the claim that they shouldn't discriminate against psychopaths.
BTW, after some time, he changed the number with the leak to another number, 50%. When you're masking your footprints, you shouldn't make the masking more visible than the footprints themselves...
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