In what sense is the Higgs expected to be discovered

DrDu

In what sense is the higgs particle expected to be discovered at the LHC?
I mean, the Higgs field has a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value, so it costs no energy to absorb or emit a higgs boson.Hence what is meant when saying that the expected mass is about 126 GeV?
I suppose one is looking for some excited state or something?

fzero

It's not an excited state. The physical Higgs field is the degree of freedom as seen in the classical vacuum state that breaks the electroweak symmetry. The [itex]SU(2)[/itex] doublet [itex]H[/itex] is an expansion around the false vacuum at [itex]\langle H \rangle =0[/itex]. The true vacuum is an expansion around [itex]\langle H^0\rangle =\upsilon[/itex], for which we write

[tex] H = \begin{pmatrix} H^+ \\ \upsilon + h \end{pmatrix}.[/tex]

[itex]H^\pm[/itex] are the degree of freedom that gets "eaten" to generate mass for the EW gauge bosons, while [itex]h[/itex] is the massive Higgs scalar being investigated. The mass of [itex]h[/itex] is set in terms of the parameters of the Higgs potential once you expand using the parametrization above.

DrDu

Ok, I see. Thank you!

Bill_K

In other words, yes the Higgs boson is an excited state of the Higgs field.