That’s a Higgs but how many?

CMS and ATLAS collaborations are yet up to work producing results from the datasets obtained in the first phase of activity of LHC. The restart is really near the corner and, maybe already the next summer, things can change considerably. Anyway what they get from the old data can be really promising and rather intriguing. This is the case for the recent paper by CMS (see here). The aim of this work is to see if a heavier state of Higgs particle exists and the kind of decay they study is . That is, one has a signature with two leptons moving in opposite directions, arising from the dacy of the , and two bottom quarks arising from the decay of the Higgs particle. The analysis of this decay aims to get hints of existence of a heavier pseudoscalar Higgs state. This can be greatly important for SUSY extensions of the Standard Model that foresee more than one Higgs particle.

Often CMS presents its results with some intriguing open questions and also this is the case and so, it is worth this blog entry. Here is the main result

The evidence, as said in the paper, is that there is a 2.6-2.9 sigma evidence at 560 GeV and a smaller one at around 300 GeV. Look elsewhere effect reduces the former at 1.1 sigma and the latter is practically negligible. Overall, this is pretty negligible but, as always, with more data at the restart, could become something real or just fade away. It should be appreciated the fact that a door is left open anyway and a possible effect is pointed out.

My personal interpretation is that such higher excitations do exist but their production rates are heavily suppressed with the respect to the observed ground state at 126 GeV and so, negligible with the present datasets. I am also convinced that the current understanding of the breaking of SUSY, currently adopted in MSSM-like to go beyond the Standard Model, is not the correct one provoking the early death of such models. I have explained this in a coupled of papers of mine (see here and here). It is my firm conviction that the restart will yield exciting results and we should be really happy to have such a powerful machine in our hands to grasp them.

Marco Frasca (2013). Scalar field theory in the strong self-interaction limit Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74:2929 arXiv: 1306.6530v5

Marco Frasca (2012). Classical solutions of a massless Wess-Zumino model J.Nonlin.Math.Phys. 20:4, 464-468 (2013) arXiv: 1212.1822v2