ATLAS and CMS discovered the Higgs boson with about 10 fb⁻¹ of integrated luminosity, a tenth of the 100 fb⁻¹ their own technical design reports said would be needed to guarantee discovery

physicshistory-of-sciencehiggs-bosonLHCATLASCMSCERN

The ATLAS and CMS Physics Technical Design Reports (ATLAS published 1999; the CMS physics TDR, per Ellis, "appeared a few years later" — his reference places it in J. Phys. G 34, 2007) stated that 100 fb⁻¹ of integrated luminosity would be needed to guarantee a Higgs discovery across the full range of possible masses. The actual 2012 discovery required roughly a tenth of that figure — about 10 fb⁻¹ — because the Higgs turned out to sit at a mass (near 125 GeV) with an unusually favorable combination of production and decay channels for the LHC detectors, rather than at a harder-to-reach point the guarantee figure had to cover.

This pairs with the LEP shutdown claim as a second instance of the same pattern in this capture: a planning figure calibrated to the worst case turning out, after the fact, to have been far more conservative than nature required. Both are quantitative claims resting on a single Tier-1 historical source (Ellis himself) restating figures from primary technical documents he does not quote directly in this paper; the underlying TDRs and discovery papers remain unread by this vault.