Under this headline, Hadron Collider ‘did NOT find Higgs Boson – but something else’, is this non-explanation:
A little research brings up Technicolor, which vaguely tickles a synapse from a couple of decades ago, but I need some translation back into English. And how realistic is this announcement anyway?
Basically, technicolor models are a proposal for an alternative model for electroweak symmetry breaking (the technical name for the process through which the W- and Z-bosons, the interaction quanta of the weak force, acquire mass)—that is, instead of introducing a single Higgs field, you instead introduce a new force, which is modelled on the strong force (so it behaves technically similar, i.e. technically like color—geddit?), or at least was in early versions. The appeal of such a scheme is that it eliminates the need for fine-tuning the Higgs mass, i.e. introducing some very delicate cancellations between the quantum corrections to the mass, which would otherwise tend to drive it to unobservably high values.
As for the proposal, I’m not too surprised that one can write down a technicolor model such that you’d get something like the CERN observations out; but the Higgs they detected, techni- or not, is just so smack-dab standard model, i.e. aligns with the predictions made using only the ‘usual’ inventory of particles so well, that I’d imagine you have to do a bit of gymnastics in order to get something that’s so close to the vanilla standard model, and yet is actually entirely new physics. But I haven’t read the paper yet, so I can’t really comment. Anyway, while it’s an interesting possibility—and one which would be very exciting if it should pan out—there’s nothing as yet that even hints at the observed Higgs being anything else than just the most boring version, so most people are still going with that.
In any case, there should be the possibility of testing it—technicolor models predict generically a whole host of new composite particles including usually several more Higgses, IIRC (but I’m not a particle theorist, so I might be off here). So there’s hope for empirical verification/falsification, which is something not every modern theory of physics can boast of.
Consider this in reference to Occam’s Razor; thus the standard model is going to be the better explanation:
“In science, Occam’s Razor is used as a heuristic (discovery tool) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models. In the scientific method, Occam’s Razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there is always an infinite number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypothesis to prevent them from being falsified; therefore, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are better testable and falsifiable.”