Comment on “Accumulating evidence for the associate production of a neutral scalar with mass around 151 GeV”

Abstract

A recent paper [1] 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 151GeV. The reported significances are 5.1σ local and 4.8σ global. This nearly reaches the 5σ 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 4.1σ local and 3.5σ global. The code and instructions for reproducing our calculations are available at this github repo.