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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Could Higgs Boson Bump Be A Mix Of Mesons?

John Moffat, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute also known for one of the lesser known relativistic modified gravity proposals, explores the possibility that the Higgs boson resonance could be a linear combination of two heavy quark mesons aka quarkonium (top-antitop and bottom-antibotton) using a mixing angle from existing physics, which would be pseudoscalar (i.e. a composite particle with an overall spin of zero, rather than a fundamental particle with spin zero).

He also describes the experimental tests necessary to distinguish the two possibilities which would in may respect have very similar properties. The easiest way to distinguish the two is via the spin-parity of the particle which could be determined through analysis of the angular distribution of the particle's decay products.

His proposal culminates about five years of papers he has written on Higgsless versions of the Standard Model.  While he is a frequent advocate for unconventional theoretical explanations of the evidence in fundamental physics, he is no crackpot, he is asking the right kinds of questions, and his proposals of experimentally testable alternatives to the Standard Model that don't involve SUSY is a valuable one that deserves more attention in contexts like analysis of LHC results.

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