LHC: fake Higgs?

Back at the LHC Shows the Way workshop and slow live blogging of the discussion, with random asides for other stuff...

Astronomy Magazine has a contest - win Brian May's PhD thesis! - now separate post with added bonus question

Today:

fake Higgs - are there some new bosons which are not Higgs, but which look like Higgs. Specifically looking at other scalar or pseudoscalars, or the possibility of spin-2 tensor particles.

Aside: cool 2D fluid flow web site - GPU powered 512k sim run live through WebGL - hypnotic turbulence to crash your browser

Look for general models where some particle couples to the decay channels observed and see what its properties are.
Get yourself into trouble by keeping a Higgs around that doesn't go into those decay modes - too many particle physicists can't suspend disbelief.

But, hey, the dilaton-not-Higgs talk earlier in the workshop is an example of this, so this generalises to what could it be if it is not Higgs, lets pretend.
Duh.

Some fine tuning is needed...

So, can you fake the Higgs with a massive spin-2 (ie some sort of massive graviton like a Kaluza-Klein theory excitation of the standard massless graviton)?

Can do a lot with that, at the price of introducing new parameters.
And of course you still need some sort of Higgs to provide standard model mass, all you do is move it to a higher mass.

Still, good to have some speculation in the back pocket in case the 125 GeV decay mode branching ratios start diverging from the standard model predictions, with or without supersymmetry.

Next talk on R symmetry...

yup, adding non minimal supersymmetry sure does add a lot of epicycles

on the other hand, if there is supersymmetry, why shouldn't it be maximal?

recent random paper on consistent r symmetries...

and for your enjoyment and education, a paper on supersoft supersymmetry - safe and snug

In the meantime, the official Higgs detection papers have appeared on arXiv:

ATLAS detection - cranked up to 5.9 σ

CMS detection - staying at a conservative 5 σ

News and discussion at phys.org

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