You may be right on that point. For some reason I was thinking they just summed up the velocities, etc from whatever hits the detector. Perhaps somewhere they assume something about the Higgs boson though.
This makes the significance testing they do even more ridiculous though. At first I thought the model of background noise was simply not providing much info about the topic of interest: the existence and mass of the Higgs.
According to what I have learned here, it is much worse. Not only are they testing a purposefully rendered false model (and taking rejection of that known-false model as evidence for the Higgs), but they are also assuming the Higgs exists (and has whatever properties you all are referring to) as part of this process. As a result, the Higgs exists either way (whether background model is rejected or not) according to this process.
This makes the significance testing they do even more ridiculous though. At first I thought the model of background noise was simply not providing much info about the topic of interest: the existence and mass of the Higgs.
According to what I have learned here, it is much worse. Not only are they testing a purposefully rendered false model (and taking rejection of that known-false model as evidence for the Higgs), but they are also assuming the Higgs exists (and has whatever properties you all are referring to) as part of this process. As a result, the Higgs exists either way (whether background model is rejected or not) according to this process.
Doing this test sounds pretty meaningless to me.