Sunday, September 25, 2011

Heavy Higgs?

Cea and Cosmai argue in a recent paper entitled "The trivial Higgs boson: first evidences from LHC" that the low expected Higgs boson mass of most current theories is a product of flawed perturbative approximations, and that a non-perturbative approach yields an expectation that the Higgs boson would have a mass of approximately pi times the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field (246 GeV), suggesting a Higgs mass of about 754 GeV +/- 40 GeV, and that this resonnance would have a (very large) 320 GeV width. They argue that this result is not inconsistent with Atlas results to date from LHC.

Hat Tip to this post at the Gauge Connection blog of Marco Frasca.

Frasca, himself, and some of his close colleagues, are looking at the interactions of magnetic fields with low energy chiral QCD behavior using latice methods. He also notes that sophisticated QCD latice work is becoming much more affordable as the price of heavy duty computational power falls.

There remain rivalies between different ways to turn the QCD equations into workable computational approximations so it is hard to know if the predictions from the computer models match the physical reality. But so far as I can tell, often enough the different methods produce the same predictions, and when they do not, the experimental evidence that would distinguish the models is not only hard to come by, but even presents questions that are hard even in principle to distinguish with experiments that approach what is possible since the interesting results arise in low energy QCD where confinement obscures our ability to directly observe the behavior predicted.

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