Good news from Moriond

Some days ago, Rencontres of Moriond 2018 ended with the CERN presenting a wealth of results also about the Higgs particle. The direction that the two great experiments, ATLAS and CMS, took is that of improving the measurements on the Standard Model as no evidence has been seen so far of possible new particles. Also, the studies of the properties of the Higgs particle have been refined as promised and the news are really striking.

In a communicate to the public (see here), CERN finally acknowledge, for the first time, a significant discrepancy between data from CMS and Standard Model for the signal strengths in the Higgs decay channels. They claim a 17% difference. This is what I advocated for some years and I have published in reputable journals. I will discuss this below. I would like only to show you the CMS results in the figure below.

ATLAS, by its side, is seeing significant discrepancy in the ZZ channel () and a compatibility for the WW channel. Here are their results.

On the left the WW channel is shown and on the right there are the combined and ZZ channels.

The reason of the discrepancy is due, as I have shown in some papers (see here, here and here), to the improper use of perturbation theory to evaluate the Higgs sector. The true propagator of the theory is a sum of Yukawa-like propagators with a harmonic oscillator spectrum. I solved exactly this sector of the Standard Model. So, when the full propagator is taken into account, the discrepancy is toward an increase of the signal strength. Is it worth a try?

This means that this is not physics beyond the Standard Model but, rather, the Standard Model in its full glory that is teaching something new to us about quantum field theory. Now, we are eager to see the improvements in the data to come with the new run of LHC starting now. In the summer conferences we will have reasons to be excited.

Advertisement

Something to say but not yet…

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.

Higgs or not Higgs, that is the question

LHCP2016 is running yet with further analysis on 2015 data by people at CERN. We all have seen the history unfolding since the epochal event on 4 July 2012 where the announcement of the great discovery happened. Since then, also Kibble passed away. What is still there is our need of a deep understanding of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model. Quite recently, LHC restarted operations at the top achievable and data are gathered and analysed in view of the summer conferences.

The scalar particle observed at CERN has a mass of about 125 GeV. Data gathered on 2015 seem to indicate a further state at 750 GeV but this is yet to be confirmed. Anyway, both ATLAS and CMS see this bump in the data and this seems to follow the story of the discovery of the Higgs particle. But we have not a fully understanding of the Higgs sector  yet. The reason is that, in run I, gathered data were not enough to reduce the error bars to such small values to decide if Standard Model wins or not. Besides, as shown by run II, further excitations seem to pop up. So, several theoretical proposals for the Higgs sector still stand up and could be also confirmed already in August this year.

Indeed, there are great news already in the data presented at LHCP2016. As I pointed out here, there is a curious behavior of the strengths of the signals of Higgs decay in and some tension, even if small, appeared between ATLAS and CMS results. Indeed, ATLAS seemed to have seen more events than CMS moving these contributions well beyond the unit value but, as CMS had them somewhat below, the average was the expected unity agreeing with expectations from the Standard Model. The strength of the signals is essential to understand if the propagator of the Higgs field is the usual free particle one or has some factor reducing it significantly with contributions from higher states summing up to unity. In this case, the observed state at 125 GeV would be just the ground state of a tower of particles being its excited states. As I showed recently, this is not physics beyond the Standard Model, rather is obtained by solving exactly the quantum equations of motion of the Higgs sector (see here). This is done considering the other fields interacting with the Higgs field just a perturbation.

So, let us do a recap of what was the situation for the strength of the signals for the decays of the Higgs particle. At LHCP2015 the data were given in the following slide

From the table one can see that the signal strengths for decays in ATLAS are somewhat beyond unity while in CMS these are practically unity for but, more interestingly, 0.85 for . But we know that data gathered for decay are largely more than for decay. The error bars are large enough to be not a concern here. The value 0.85 is really in agreement with the already cited exact computations from the Higgs sector but, within the error, in overall agreement with the Standard Model. This seems to point toward on overestimated number of events in ATLAS but a somewhat reduced number of events in CMS, at least for decay.

At LHCP2016 new data have been presented from the two collaborations, at least for the decay. The results are striking. In order to see if the scenario provided from the exact solution of the Higgs sector is in agreement with data, these should be confirmed from run II and those from ATLAS should go down significantly. This is indeed what is going on! This is the corresponding slide

This result is striking per se as shows a tendency toward a decreasing value when, in precedence, it was around unity. Now it is aligned with the value seen at CMS for the decay! The value seen is again in agreement with that given in the exact solution of the Higgs sector. And ATLAS? This is the most shocking result: They see a significant reduced set of events and the signal strength they obtain is now aligned to the one of CMS (see Strandberg’s talk at page 11).

What should one conclude from this? If the state at 750 GeV should be confirmed, as the spectrum given by the exact solution of the Higgs sector is given by an integer multiplied by a mass, this would be at . Together with the production strengths, if further data will confirm them, the proper scenario for the breaking of electroweak symmetry is exactly the one described by the exact solution. Of course, this should be obviously true but an experimental confirmation is essential for a lot of reasons, last but not least the form of the Higgs potential that, if the numbers are these, the one postulated in the sixties would be the correct one. An other important reason is that coupling with other matter does not change the spectrum of the theory in a significant way.

So, to answer to the question of the title remains to wait a few weeks. Then, summer conferences will start and, paraphrasing Coleman: God knows, I know and by the end of the summer we all know.

Marco Frasca (2015). A theorem on the Higgs sector of the Standard Model Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 199 arXiv: 1504.02299v3

Higgs what?

In these days it has been announced the new version of Review of Particle Physics by the Particle Data Group (PDG). This is the bread and butter of any particle physicist and contains all the relevant data about this area of research. It is quite common for us to search the on-line version or using the booklet to know a mass or a decay rate. After the first run of LHC data gathering about Higgs particle, this edition contains a bunch of fundamental informations about it and I post a part of them.

It is Standard Model Higgs! No, not so fast. Take a look at the WW final state. It is somewhat low but yes, it is perfectly consistent with the Standard Model. Also, error bars are somewhat large to conclude something definitive. So, let us take a look nearer at these strengths.

We discover that the strengths measured by CMS are really low and takes down this value. Indeed, this is consistent with my proposal here. I get 0.68 for both channels WW and ZZ. On the other side, ATLAS moves all upward consistently and there is this strange behaviour compensating each other. So, let us also take a look at the ZZ strength. PDG yields

again CMS agrees with my conclusions and ATLAS moves all upward to compensate. But both these results, due to the large error bars, agree rather well with the Standard Model. So, I looked for the publication by CMS  that were produced till today if one or both these analyses were improved. The result was that CMS improved the measure of the strength in the WW channel to leptons (see here). What they measure is

The error is significantly smaller and the result striking. It is bending in the “wrong” turn loosing higgsness. It would be interesting to understand why CMS appear to get results downward for these strengths and ATLAS more upward compensating each other toward the Standard Model. On the other side, I should admire the more aggressive approach by CMS with their results more and more similar to my expectations. I am just curious to see with the restart of LHC what will happen to these data that CMS sharpened to such a point.

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

CMS Collaboration (2013). Measurement of Higgs boson production and properties in the WW decay
channel with leptonic final states JHEP 01 (2014) 096 arXiv: 1312.1129v2