By Hamish Johnston
“Beyond any reasonable doubt, it is a Higgs boson, and here we examine the extent to which its couplings resemble those of the single Higgs boson of the Standard Model.”
That’s taken from the abstract of a new paper by John Ellis and Tevong You of King’s College London. Ellis, of course, has been associated with CERN for decades and if he says it’s a Higgs that’s good enough for me!
But what about the second part of that sentence – are the couplings of the particle discovered at the LHC those of a Standard Model Higgs?
The equation below says it all:
In this context µ is a measure of how closely the decay of the Higgs via several decay channels (or couplings) resembles that expected of a Higgs Boson described by the Standard Model. A Standard Model Higgs should have a value of one, and the µ calculated using data from the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments is well within that value.
That said, Ellis and You have not completely given up on hints of physics beyond the Standard Model. They point out that the mass and couplings of the Higgs still leave the door open to supersymmetry.
The LHC and its experiments are now shut down for a major upgrade – and you may be wondering if there is any important information about the Higgs still lurking in the existing data? Ellis and You seem to be saying no, writing that the previous run “has now yielded most of its Higgs secrets, and we look forward to the next LHC run at higher energy, and its later runs at significantly higher luminosity”.
If you are in need of regular Higgs updates, you could be in for two or more years of cold turkey.
