Marge

Yeah resonances and such would be new, but nothing as exciting as say a charged Higgs. I think they found some previously undiscovered resonance particle at the LHC a few months ago, but it didn't really even make the news outside physics.

Thanks for the link, that was actually really helpful. I wonder why the paper doesn't say anything about if their data would fit a type I or type III charged Higgs. Probably has something to do with whether leptons are considered to be up or down type (?) and thus how the charged Higgses would couple in the given process.

Right, sorry, I misunderstood. You are right and this was explained well by yk a couple of posts below.

>3 sigmas is called evidence. >5 sigmas would be called discovery. This is the standard particle physics convention. 3 sigmas also seems to be the unofficial limit after which you are allowed to get a little excited and start to speculate about the explanations. :) As the paper says the 3.4 sigmas corresponds to a p value of 6.9 x 10^-4, which means that supposing only stuff included in the Standard Model exists, getting these results (or something even stronger) just by chance has the probability of 6.9 x 10^-4. That doesn't pop the champagne yet, but it's definitely something to talk about.

Yes.

I lack the background to judge whether this will probably be explained by something relatively boring such as a new resonance particle composed of already known fundamental particles (i.e. a new baryon) or maybe an excited state of an already known particle, or something fundamentally new, like supersymmetry, Higgs or something else. This is why I posed the title as a question.

I find it very interesting though that the paper speaks about excluding the "type II two-Higgs-doublet (2HD) model charged Higgs", but I don't know what "type II" there means. The 2HDM is the simplest way you can extend the Standard Model Higgs field (which is what all the Higgs search buzz is about) in to many beyond the standard model theories, like supersymmetry. At least the apparently quite popular minimal supersymmetric model has a 2HD. But the key question is what's type II, and where's my type I?