Vaporous Rumors of the Higgs Boson

For two weeks now there have been hints that the Higgs boson, the last piece of the puzzle, has been seen. The evidence comes from the LHC.  There are two experiments at the LHC (well seven in fact, but two big ones) and both of them saw excesses.  So the Higgs boson has many different ways it can be seen -- these are called "signatures" and these appear in different categories called "channels".   Each experiment saw excesses in the WW and ZZ channels and are signatures of a Higgs decaying into WW and ZZ.  These are exactly the signatures that you'd expect the Standard Model Higgs to have.

The mass for the Higgs boson would be approximately 145 GeV -- about 150 times heavier than the proton.   This mass range has profound implications for what the Standard Model is.  The biggest of which is that supersymmetry as we know would be strongly disfavored.  

There are two default interpretations.  The first is that the Standard Model is all there is and we've more or less discovered the last particle that we'll ever see .

The other interpretation is a theory called Split Supersymmetry.  This is a radical revision in the motivation for supersymmetry that changes where you expect the new physics.  This mass range for the Higgs boson is precisely where Split Susy predicts as depicted below.

With Daniele Alves and Eder Izaguirre we put out a quick interoperation of a potential Higgs discovery with this mass.

Of course, nothing is ever easy... there are rumors now that the excesses are going away now that there is nearly twice as much data as there was when the results were released.    There is always a lot of angst and nervousness with leading interpretations of potential anomalies.