I came here from the link provided on your latest post, but my reading another link there to Wikipedia discussing top quark physics seems to belie the following statement.
"...theory indeed prevents us from having any composite particle containing a top quark or a top antiquark."
The Wikipedia page states:
"...the Higgs boson is composed of a pair of top and antitop quarks."
So, I wonder how this is resolved in your research into top quark physics, in which your first assertion seems supported by the lack of Higgs bosons generated by the data you have considered. I also recall the Higgs being confirmed a few years ago, and, without researching that announcement further, wonder if that resulted from exactly the top-antitop pairing being observed at CERN? Isn't the Higgs toponium? If not what is the difference between toponium and the Higgs?
The coming order of magnitude upgrade of CERN's capabilities seems potential of shedding light (ahem!) on the extension of the standard model into topcolor and colorons. You must be like a kid on Christmas Eve, eager to open the presents higher energies might leave under the tree of your research - but having to wait 4 years for them to erupt from the quantum foam into existence.
Thanks!
Thanks for the engaging comment! Really!
There are several closely related but distinct notions getting mixed together here, so let me try to clarify. First, regarding this point:
Such a statement is not correct within the Standard Model, and I could not find it on the Higgs boson Wikipedia page either. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that the Higgs couples most strongly to the top quark. This strong coupling plays an important role in Higgs physics, but it does not mean that the Higgs is a bound state of a top-antitop pair.
In addition, in the Standard Model the Higgs boson is an elementary scalar particle. There do exist speculative models beyond the Standard Model in which the Higgs is composite, but even in those scenarios it would be made of new fundamental constituents and not of top quarks. Note that at present, there is no evidence supporting such a composite Higgs interpretation, although it is not fully ruled out as well.
Toponium and the Higgs are very different. Toponium refers to would-be bound states of a top quark and an antitop quark. Because the top quark decays extremely rapidly, it does not live long enough to form a true bound state. What remains are subtle Standard Model effects in top-antitop production which we loosely refer to as toponium effects, and which were computed in the 1980s. What has been interesting is that the LHC has started to observe structures in data precisely where such effects were expected, even though they were long thought to be too small to be seen. The open question is whether what we observe fully matches the Standard Model expectation, or whether there are deviations hinting at something new. From my own work, there are some intriguing aspects, but it is far too early to draw conclusions in one way or the other.
Exciting times, indeed, but also a long game. Patience is to some extent part of the job, and we will have to wait way more than four years to get the final words on that story.
I should have linked the Wikipedia page I cited and noted the reference to theory seeking to extend the standard model, which I here rectify.
My nescience of top physics - of physics generally, TBH - appears to have confused me regarding such hypotheses and their speculative nature, as opposed to the standard model. I very much appreciate you clearing up that confusion.
The next chapter is the next leg of the journey, and the journey is the destination in science, where the final word is never written.
In fact, in the last statement I was more thinking about the LHC timeline which is easy to grasp at our scale. In four years, the machine will resume its operations until about 2040, to which we can add a few extra years for analysing all data. Therefore, I still hope/wish to see something interesting (confirmation, refinement, etc.) before my retirement (and hopefully the end of my time on this planet).