Monday, February 27, 2012

Higgs Prediction Revisited

Last year, I predicted at this blog that a Standard Model Higgs boson would have been discovered or ruled out by the time that the Academy Awards were awarded in 2012, which happened yesterday. Overall, I give myself credit for being more right than wrong. While we don't have a five sigma "discovery" in hand, the evidence at the end of last year, which when updated early this year approaches 4 sigma, makes the case that a Higgs boson of approproximately 125 GeV exists quite strong, and strongly disfavors a Higgsless model. Moreover, the details of that discovery rather strongly support the notion that this particle lacks a net electromagnetic charge and tends to show rather strongly that it has spin zero.

The discovery to date doesn't definitively rule out the possibility that there may be additional Higgs bosons out there, as in SUSY models, or that the discovered particle is actually composite, but there is no evidence strongly pointing towards the ressonance seen having any characteristics inconsistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson.

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