Problems with Higgs interpretation of 125 GeV signal

New Scientist had a very interesting piece with title Is the LHC throwing away too much data?. The not so often mentioned fact is that LHC produces enormous amounts of data, and only the data which could serve as signals of expected kind of new physics is stored. One tries to find only the signatures of theories accepted by hegemony to be worth of considering. If the correct theory is something else than expected, then the only signature of it is the failure to discover the signatures predicted by theories whose proponents have better social skills! No-one takes seriously this kind of indirect argument in favor of a theory like TGD but this is the only argument that a theorists thrown out of the community can represent. Somewhat frustrating!

Theoretically we know that some kind of new physics must emerge in TeV scale. It is however becoming clear that the expected signatures of SUSY are not there: missing energy is missing. Lubos however still fabulates about super-secret information according to which the discovery of stop and sbottom will be reported within few months. Also a long list of exotic and less exotic "predictions" of M-theory and F-theory have been killed (see the posting of Peter Woit about the sad situation in F-theory). Also Jester tells about new SUSY limits from ATLAS.

Could it be that particle physicists in there state of "knowing" have made a horrible mistake. The arrogance of particle physicists is a legend - to see what I mean just look for some postings in the blog posting of Lubos Motl debunking top experimentalist Anton Zeiliger - and arrogance is something which does not go without ultimate penalty.

There is however something genuine there: the 125 GeV signal interpreted tentatively as Higgs but it seems that it might be something different from Higgs. The posting of Tommaso is titled The Say of the Week: Higs Properties. The say of the week is from the article Reconstructing Higgs Boson Properties from the LHC and Tevatron Data by P.P. Giardino, K. Kannike, M. Raidal, and A. Strumia. The say deserves to be glued also here.

After fixing the Higgs boson mass to the best fit value m_h = 125 GeV, the SM does not have any free parameter left to vary. Therefore all the anomalies in the present data must be statistical fluctuations and disappear with more statistics. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the average of all data agrees with the SM prediction and the global χ² is good: 16 for 15 dof (we recall that with n>>1 degrees of freedom one expects χ² = n+/-n^1/2 ).

On the other hand, our best fit has a significantly lower χ² = 5.5 for 13 dof: a bigger reduction than what is typically obtained by adding two extra parameters (one expects Δ χ² = -Δ n +/- (/Delta; n)^1/2 when adding Δ n >> 1 parameters). The SM is disfavored at more than 95 per cent CL in this particular context, but of course we added the two parameters that allow to fit the two most apparent anomalies in the data, the γγ excess and the WW^* deficit.

Only more data will tell if this is a trend, or if we are just fitting a statistical fluctuation.

What is found that the best fit to the signal at 125 GeV is not in good agreement with standard model. Higgs to γγ decay rate is too strong - 4 times too strong in the fit of the paper - and too weak signals to WW^* signal and to quark-antiquark channels are the problems.

It has been found that the fit assuming top-phobic or even fermion-phobic Higgs is better than standard model fit but this would mean giving up the very idea about Higgs expectation as a mechanism of massivation! It is also reported that MSSM allowing the mass of stop and parameters of MSSM as additional parameters fails to help in the situation. The conclusion saving standard model Higgs/MSSM Higgs would be that the anomalies are due to statistical fluctuations and that more data is expected to remove the anomalies.

In TGD framework simplest scenario does not predict Higgs at all and 125 GeV signal would correspond to a pion-like state of what I have dubbed as M₈₉ hadron physics. The basic prediction is it decays to γγ pair by the coupling to instanton density. It would decays faster to u and d type quarks than other quarks since it is composite of their p-adically scaled up variants. To heavier quark pairs it decays only via gluon-gluon intermediate states so that the decay rates would be slower. This could be called not fully-fledged q-phobia with q= t, b, c, s combined with bad lepto-phobia. The claimed decays of 125 GeV state to bbar pair could be understood as taking place via gluon pairs. One must of course take also this claim with extreme caution.

During these two years of continual wrong alarms from experimentalists and I have become rather cautious in making optimistic statements. If this were not the case I would proudly declare: Yes this is what I have been saying all the time! The signal is there but its not Higgs!