Comment on "Accumulating Evidence for the Associate Production of a Neutral Scalar with Mass around 151 GeV"

TL;DR

This paper critically examines recent claims of evidence for a new 151 GeV scalar particle, suggesting that the significance levels are lower than originally reported when accounting for multiple channels, thus questioning the discovery claim.

Contribution

It provides a reanalysis of the combined CMS and ATLAS data, adjusting significance levels for multiple testing, and offers reproducible code for verification.

Findings

Original significance was 5.1σ local, 4.8σ global.

Reanalyzed significance drops to 4.1σ local, 3.5σ global.

Questions the robustness of the claimed discovery.

Abstract

A recent paper [2109.02650] accumulates evidence for a new fundamental particle by combining several CMS and ATLAS searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. The putative particle is a neutral scalar, $S$, with a mass of about 151 GeV. The reported significances are $5.1\sigma$ local and $4.8\sigma$ global. This nearly reaches the $5\sigma$ threshold for a discovery in high-energy physics. In this brief note we cast doubt on the strength of the evidence for a new particle. After taking into account the fact that signals were fitted to six different channels, we find that the significances are only $4.1\sigma$ local and $3.5\sigma$ global. The code and instructions for reproducing our calculations are available at https://github.com/andrewfowlie/accumulating_evidence.