CMS: a 2.9-sigma \(WH\) hint at \(1850\GeV\)

Unfortunately, due to a short circuit somewhere at the LHC, a small metallic piece will have to be removed – which takes a week (it's so slow because CERN employs LEGO men to do the job) – and the 2015 LHC physics run may be postponed by up to 5 weeks because of that.

Wolfram: You have the last week to buy Mathematica at a 25% discount (a "pi day" celebration; student edition). Edward Measure has already happily bought it.

Meanwhile, ATLAS and CMS have flooded their web pages with new papers resulting from the 2012 run. In most of these papers, the Standard Model gets an "A".




It is not really the case of the CMS' note

Search for massive \(WH\) resonances decaying to \(\ell\nu b\bar b\) final state in the boosted regime at \(\sqrt{s}=8\TeV\)

because a local 2.9-sigma excess is seen in the muon subchannel – see Figures 5, 6b, and 7 – for the mass of a new hypothetical charged particle \(1.8\TeV\leq m_{W'} \leq 1.9 \TeV\).




It's a small excess – the confidence level gets reduced to about 2 sigma with the look-elsewhere correction – but this new hypothetical charged particle could be interpreted within the Littlest Higgs model (theory) or a Heavy Vector Triplet model, among other, perhaps more likely ones.

In the (now) long list of LHC anomalies mentioned at this blog, some of them could look similar, especially the \(2.1 \TeV\) right-handed \(W_R^\pm\)-boson (CMS July 2014) and and the strange effective-mass \(1.65\TeV\) events (ATLAS March 2012).