Thursday, April 7, 2016

750-GeV Bump Is A Third-Generation Higgs Boson--Not


Update August 5, 2016: The LHC collaborations have announced that the 750-GeV bump they saw in their 2015 data is not there in their 2016 data. It was a statistical fluke, so you can ignore this post--it's wrong. It shows once again that in physics,if you know the answer you're looking for, you can always find a way to get it.

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A small excess of decays to two photons at a mass of 750 GeV, seen by both the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, has the physics community in a tizzy. If confirmed, the bump is evidence for a new particle that isn’t predicted by the Standard Model, thereby qualifying as the long-sought “new physics” that could break the current doldrums in particle physics. Theorists have already published dozens of papers attempting to explain the small bump in the data. The new particle would be a boson, most closely resembling a heavy Higgs boson with six times the 125-GeV mass of the known Higgs.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think the LHC’s bump is real. I predict that it is in fact a heavy Higgs boson. It turns out that such a particle can be easily explained in the context of the spacetime model that is the subject of this blog.