Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Higgs, top, 750 GeV

It is a long-standing idea that the Higgs might be a top-antitop bound state. (I have proposed a bootstrap version of this idea.)

My credence for that idea has just gone way up, now that I have discovered another long-standing proposal, that there might be a light bound state of 6 tops and 6 anti-tops. The number 6 appears because the top quark has two spin states and three color states, so this is the maximum number of tops in the same wavefunction that is allowed by the Pauli exclusion principle.

I had already wondered if the LHC bump at 750 GeV was somehow 6 Higgs bosons bound by top loops, since 750 GeV = 6 x 125 GeV, the Higgs mass. But if the Higgs is already a top-antitop bound state...

4 comments:

  1. None of the other bound states have a mass less than the sum of the pole masses of the quarks in the composite hadron. A 750 GeV particle would have a mass much less than this.

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    1. Froggatt and Nielsen's idea is that the Higgs-force binding energy makes the difference.

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    2. Understood. I just think that a negative binding energy is implausible. The only reason you see it is atomic nuclei is that people don't conventionally use the most stable isotope of Fe as the baseline.

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