22 July rumor: Higgs at 144 GeV and anti-Higgs at 350 GeV (comment?)

bcrowell

Not really. There's an 8% chance that they would get these results if there is no Higgs.

For comparison, suppose that someone tells me he's done an experiment to look for ghosts in a haunted house, the results were positive, and the probability is 0.1% that he would get these positive results if ghosts aren't real. Should I now say that there is a 0.1% chance that ghosts don't exist, and a 99.9% chance that they do? No, because the existence of ghosts is something to which I assign a very small a priori probability.

Suppose that I had access to secret data showing that the Higgs definitely existed, and had the energy where they see this peak. Then the a priori probability would be 100%, and I would assign a 100% probability to the statement that what they saw was the Higgs.

The thing is, there is no neutral a priori probability here. E.g., it doesn't make sense just to say the the a priori odds of existence of the Higgs in this energy range are 50/50.

Berlin

Is there a natural extension of the SM predicting a different mass for the anti-higgs to the higgs? Maybe also quantatively?!

berlin

bcrowell

This seemed very mysterious to me in the anonymous post on the Woit blog. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in the Strassler page or the Nature article. Isn't the Higgs supposed to be its own antiparticle? And I've never heard of an antiparticle having a different mass from the particle itself. In any case, it seems premature to talk about changing the standard model when there is actually no firm evidence that the Higgs has even been detected.

eXorikos

I got this link from the internet http://blog.vixra.org/2011/07/26/glo...tandard-model/

His conclusion is: In conclusion, the Standard Model is dead.

I'm not educated in QFT, but is what he says to come to that conclusion correct or is it more subtle than he makes it seem?

marcus

Thanks for the response to the anonymous post, which was the 22 July rumor referred to in the title. I was curious about it, suspicious a bit ---especially the part about antiHiggs detection at the different mass.
I get the sense that other people agree. It can be ignored. And nothing to confirm it has come in, I gather, during the past 4 days.

Vanadium 50

By "anti-Higgs", I think they mean a dip - an area with fewer events than expected. Not a particle.

marcus

Finally I get it!!!! Thanks Vanadium.

Now that 22 July rumor can be seen as roughly compatible with the more precise and reliable blog reports, from Strassler and others, we began to get at nearly the same time.

lpetrich

That second bump is at 250 GeV, not at 350 GeV, and though ATLAS sees it at almost 2 stdevs, CMS doesn't.

Extensions of the Standard Model like the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) predict more than one Higgs particle: three neutral ones and one charged one with charges +1 and -1.

So the ATLAS team could have detected two Higgs particles.

Vanadium 50

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The ATLAS experiment hasn't said they see one, much less two!