Last week I have been in Montpellier to attend QCD 17 Conference hosted at the CNRS and whose mainly organizer is Stephan Narison. At this conference participates a lot of people from CERN presenting new results very nearly to the main summer conferences. This year, QCD 17 was in conjuction with EPSHEP 2017 were the new results coming from LHC were firstly presented. This means that the contents of the talks in the two conferences just superposed in a matter of few hours.
On Friday, the last day of conference, I posted the following twitter after attending the talk by Shunsuke Honda on behalf of ATLAS at QCD 17:
and the reason was this slide
The title of the talk was “Cross sections and couplings of the Higgs Boson from ATLAS”. As you can read from it, there is a deviation of about 2 sigmas from the Standard Model for the Higgs decaying to ZZ(4l) for VBF. Indeed, they can claim agreement yet but it is interesting anyway (maybe are we missing anything?). The previous day at EPSHEP 2017, Ruchi Gupta on behalf of ATLAS presented an identical talk with the title “Measurement of the Higgs boson couplings and properties in the diphoton, ZZ and WW decay channels using the ATLAS detector” and the slide was the following:
The result is still there but with a somewhat sober presentation. What does this mean? Presently, this amounts to very few. We are still within the Standard Model even if something seems to peep out. In order to claim a discovery, this effect should be seen with a lower error and at CMS too. The implications would be that there could be a more complex spectrum of the Higgs sector with a possible new understanding of naturalness if such a spectrum would not have a formal upper bound. People at CERN promised more data coming in the next weeks. Let us see what will happen to this small effect.
Posted by mfrasca 
The Gauge Connection 