Higgs Discovery and the Look Elsewhere Effect

Higgs Discovery and the Look Elsewhere Effect

The discovery of the Higgs particle required a signal of five sigma significance. The rigid application of that condition is a convention that disregards more specific aspects of the given experiment. In particular, it does not account for the characteristics of the look elsewhere effect in the individual experimental context. The paper relates this aspect of data analysis to the question as to...

A philosophical look at the discovery the Higgs boson

A Philosophical Look at the Higgs Mechanism

On the occasion of the recent experimental detection of a Higgstype particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the paper reviews philosophical aspects of the Higgs mechanism as the presently preferred account of the generation of particle masses in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics and its most discussed extensions. The paper serves a twofold purpose: on the one hand, ...

Beyond the standard Higgs after the 125 GeV Higgs discovery.

An elementary weakly coupled and solitary Higgs boson allows one to extend the validity of the Standard Model up to very high energy, maybe as high as the Planck scale. Nonetheless, this scenario fails to fill the universe with dark matter and does not explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry. However, amending the Standard Model tends to destabilize the weak scale by large quantum corrections t...

Higgs Discovery before Lhc ?

The standard model (SM) of fundamental interactions, has been the successful theory over the last 25 years. The overall success of the SM in describing the elementary interactions, the discovery of gauge bosons at CERN in the eighties as well as the top discovery at Fermilab in 1995, strengthened the expectation that the Higgs mechanism is the one that gives mass to all particles. At the moment...