After seeing comments of some physicists in New Scientist that began to question the claimed for Higgs compatibility of results and also of critiques by Luis Sancho — co-litigant against US govt for its partial funding of LHC — I would like to outline my own doubts about the way in which the Higgs data is being processed. For this I’ll use a short story based on an analogy of these searches.

Prologue
In the experimental searches for Higgs at the LHC it is investigated whether there are higher numbers of particle decay than would be expected from today’s standard model. This is for those channels of particle decays that are explored and for which the Higgs boson itself would decay into. These decay channels are of bottom quarks, tau leptons, di-photons and those involving decays of weakly interacting bosons. The numbers of these decays are then also compared with the alternative version of the standard model where the Higgs boson is itself incorporated. The following story is intended as a parady in order to question the way CERN processes the of results these searches. The last section relates to how — for the same number of collisions within the CMS detector — there are now published revised results for the same number of collisions. These revisions have the effect of slightly reducing the deviations from standard Higgs in two of the decay channels. The peer review for this paper was exclusively by at most three CERN based staff and one CERN affiliate.

A Short Story — the Higgs Archery Challenge

In this new type of archery event, named after its inventor Higgs, the ‘Higgs compatibility award’ will be granted based on how accurate the shooting is overall. The target is a horizontal band that is placed 30 degrees above eye level and 125m away. The team, with three members, is called ‘Unexpected’.

‘Unexpected’ is known for having one team member, called ‘weak boson’, who is accurate, another — ‘bottom tau’ — tending to strike too low, with the last — di-photon — striking too high.

After an initial warm –up round, each archer is given another shot each. The result is that ‘Unexpected’ scores as it did in the practice (despite its name) showing an overall wide spread. This includes one strike nearer the lower edge of the target band, a strike well above it and one below.

The judges finally deliver their verdict — “We now award to ‘Unexpected’ the Higgs compatibility challenge award. Our congratulations.”

But some members of the audience complained that ‘Unexpected’ had only struck once within the area of the target zone — just one in three! The judges, who were from the ‘Centre Européen de Retraitement Numéro’ (‘European centre for number reprocessing’), were unpersuaded by the critics. The judges explained that the strike above the band can be compensated for by the two other strikes that were at least below the centre of the target band. There was particular concern from the critics that a strike too high — at least when there were also strikes below — should receive even higher scores than hitting within the target band itself. The critics had, for this first public event, mistakenly taken it for granted that archery is, well, archery.

Subsequently, an independent investigation led to the criticism that the lowest and highest scoring marks from Unexpected were — when both sessions were taken together — so extreme that this meant that the team’s success should be annulled according to the incompatibility with Higgs’ band of these strikes in particular.

So later again a reconsideration of the award was given over to another panel of judges. While the appeal judges were new, they too, all either worked at — or were affiliated to — CERN. They in turn decided that the old results for the scores of the lowest and highest marks in particular could be revised from the previous score that there both recorded as striking nearer the central line. The result was that the inaccuracy in these channels was no longer sufficient to annul the overall success. Unexpected’s award medal was thus finally confirmed.

Absolutely correct — once you have seen the limitations of physics. Nevertheless this very limitation is a big eye-opener, is it not?