Same old Standard Model

(Courtesy: CERN)

By Tushna Commissariat

After the rather disappointing news for SUSY researchers from the Hadron Collider Conference in Kyoto this week, it seems as if physicists at the conference have not had anything exciting to say about the Higgs boson either. While both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations did present their latest results, from data collected since the historic Higgs discovery in July, all the current results still point to a Standard Model Higgs.

As a number of other bloggers have already pointed out, what is probably most interesting about these latest results is what is missing – both CMS and ATLAS have only updated certain channels. Conspicuous by its absence was the diphoton (gamma–gamma) channel, which was not updated by either collaboration. The reason for this seems to be some discrepancy between the analysis done by the two experiments, with concerns regarding systematic errors and calibration. Adam Falkowski, who writes the Resonances blog, explains these discrepancies in some more depth.

Papers with the new results from both CMS and ATLAS are available, but the usual blog suspects – Peter Woit, Matt Strassler and the viXra – all agree that the results are anti-climactic. It seems as though we will have to wait until the mysterious diphoton channel gives up its secrets, hopefully by sometime next year, before there is Higgs euphoria again.