How will LHC know the Higgs when they see it?

1. Sep 10, 2008

poeteye

How will LHC know the Higgs when they "see" it?

Amid the petabytes of information about to stream forth from Europe, how will Physics know if it has been wrong about the Higgs field and what may prove the premise? What's the best or worst case scenario, and what comes next?

2. Sep 10, 2008

malawi_glenn

Re: How will LHC know the Higgs when they "see" it?

If they don't see a new signal at all around mass 120-170GeV/c^2 or anything new at all.

Or do you want to know more about "how to detect" the higgs? like:
$$H \rightarrow \mu^+\mu^-\mu^+\mu^-$$

3. Sep 11, 2008

atyy

Re: How will LHC know the Higgs when they "see" it?

From John Conway's blog:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/11/06/higgs-101/

If we don’t see a Higgs boson (SM-like or supersymmetric) with mass less than about 130 GeV, things will get very interesting - it’s almost a certainty then that some other model is the correct explanation.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/01/26/bump-hunting-part-1/

So there I was, on a Saturday morning in December, at CERN as it so happened, when I saw the graph we’d been working towards all year. At first I thought it was some mistake - the hair literally rose up on the back of my neck, and I said: “Holy crap! What’s that?”