Sleeping with the Higgs

All my life the Higgs was sort of a legend. Something like a unicorn: you know well how it's supposed to look like but you don't seriously expect to see it. Since last week it feels different. Of course, everybody from the CERN DG to common bloggers justly calls for caution and not jumping to conclusions. Of course, we've seen much larger excesses go away. Of course, there is statistics, likelihoods, look-elsewhere effects, and other attributes of civilization. But there's also the good old hunch. The latter, after digesting the totality of ATLAS and CMS findings, tells me there's about a 90% chance that the Higgs exists in the mass range 124-126 GeV. This high estimate follows from the remarkable consistency of the signal between ATLAS and CMS, and between different search channels. Moreover, that mass neatly fits into the ballpark suggested by electroweak precision fits. Last not least, most of the remaining Higgs mass range is either excluded or disfavored, except maybe around 119 GeV. In other words, I don't care much about the look-elsewhere correction because there isn't any elsewhere to speak of.

Thus, I'm slowly getting used to the idea of the Higgs becoming flesh and bones. On one hand this gives me thrills, as one of the greatest mystery of the universe is being solved in front of our eyes. At the same time I can see dark clouds at the horizon. There has been a well-founded hope that the Higgs would show some unexpected properties, thus opening us the doors to new physics. In the end, it would not make sense if a theoretical concept put forward 40+ years ago showed up in Nature in precisely the predicted form, would it? Yet what ATLAS and CMS are seeing looks dangerously close to the Standard Model Higgs: the signal is showing up everywhere it should, and with roughly the size it should. Of course (now this is a serious of course) we're in no position yet to make any quantitative statements about the properties of the Higgs. Indeed, measuring the couplings of the Higgs to matter will be the clue of the experimental particle physics program for the next 20 years. The more precisely we'll measure these couplings, the bigger chance there is to catch a glimpse of new physics. Still, it is getting more likely than ever that the Standard Model is the correct description of physics at the TeV energies. This is dubbed the nightmare scenario; in the first place a nightmare for particle theorists who become expendable, but in a 30 years perspective also a nightmare for the entire particle physics program. Before the start of the LHC I was giving the nightmare scenario a 50% chance. It's more than that now. Once the Higgs is formally discovered and it fits the Standard Model one... I'm getting cold shivers just thinking about it...

PS. Regardless, isn't it a beauty ;-)