Higgs Question

This article (Guardian) mentions the possible detection of 2 “bumps” between 120 and 140 GeV.

I’d expect that the values will eventually converge to a definitive number following further test runs. That said…is it possible for the damn thing to oscillate between values?

I haven’t really been following the latest news, and I’m not a particle-physics specialist, but my understanding from talking to people who are specialists over the years is that nothing precludes there from being more than one kind of Higgs particle out there. You only “need” one Higgs to activate the mass-giving voodoo that’s needed in the Standard Model, so most of the attention has been focused on these simple models where there’s only one (Occam’s Razor and all that.) But there’s always been a small minority of papers which explore the possibility of more than one kind of Higgs Boson, just like there’s more than one kind of neutrino or more than one color of quark. It’s entirely possible that one of these more complicated models is actually what describes the Universe; we’ll see what falls out as the data converges.

It’s not unprecedented for a particle to have more than one mass: Neutrinos pull off that trick, too. Though there are still three different kinds of neutrino; it’s just a bit ambiguous which three kinds they are.

And of course, there might be all sorts of other particles hiding up there. Even if both bumps are real (and you shouldn’t be paying too much attention to preliminary leaks like this; they might not be), it’s quite possible that one or both is something other than the Higgs. Again, there’s precedent for this sort of thing: Yukawa predicted a particle at a bit over a hundred MeV, for instance, and when they looked at those energies they found one, but it turned out to have completely different properties than Yukawa predicted. Then they realized that there were actually two completely different particles at about that mass, the pion (which is the one Yukawa predicted), and the muon (which was the one they detected first).