Thanks to Sven Heinemeyer and his colleagues, we can give a peek today at the status of the agreement of top and W boson masses with Standard Model predictions for the Higgs boson mass, and with SUSY predictions as well. The figure below is just one of the many versions he has produced.



Maybe I should not say "SUSY predictions", as it is clear, by inspecting the figure above, that the green band is quite wide, a result of the many free parameters whose value have an impact in determining the mass of the lightest Higgs scalar.

In any case, the graph represents an impressive picture of self-consistency of the Standard Model with the experimentally allowed values of the Higgs boson (the blue band).

We used to talk of an existing "tension" between radiative correction fits and existing bounds for the Higgs (which have remained those of LEP II for almost a decade before the first Tevatron exclusions and then the LHC exclusions pitched in), but it is clear that much of that tension has faded away: everything is consistent with a Higgs boson of mass in the 125 GeV ballpark.

So, will it be a SUSY or a SM Higgs ? You know what I believe, but you are allowed to dream on - SUSY allows you an infinite set of different dreams, in a over-100-dimensional parameter space. But if you are a pragmatic dreamer you might want to wait and check the new CMS and ATLAS results on SUSY bounds - they are going to appear in a couple of weeks, right in time for the last winter conferences. So stay tuned!

UPDATE: in the comments thread below, Sven correctly points to a better version of the figure, see below.