Refuting the Higgs mechanism

The 125 GeV boson exists — nobody doubts it. But the mechanism that is supposed to give it its role was never proven: at the level of the measured couplings it is indistinguishable from the TQNT reading through the spacetime weave. A measurement already scheduled decides between them.

What 2012 proved — and what remains open

In 2012, CERN discovered a scalar boson at 125 GeV. Ten years of measurements then established that its couplings to the other particles are proportional to their masses (the eight measured κ are compatible with 1 at the 5–10 % level). That is a solid fact — and TQNT reproduces it in full.

What the experiment did not prove is that these couplings come from the Higgs mechanism: a potential V(φ) written down by hand, whose two parameters are measured (never predicted) and whose 9+ Yukawa couplings are free. At the level of the tree couplings, the Higgs mechanism and the TQNT reading predict exactly the same thing — the 2012 experiment cannot tell them apart. The refutation is decided elsewhere: on the shape of the potential.

Two readings of the same “coupling ∝ mass” pattern

The potential comes from the spacetime weave — and it predicts the boson's mass

The spacetime weave has no scalar scale of its own: its electroweak scale is transmuted (α per crossing, eight rungs down from the Planck mass). The effective potential is then the scale-free Coleman–Weinberg form — the one that died in the Standard Model because of the sign of the top loop — equipped with a normalization that does not proceed through matter loops: a discrete flow, an angular increment of 1/π per rung. The result fits on one line:

Equivalently, the Higgs quartic coupling becomes a pure number: λ = 2/(π ln 1/α) = 0.12939, against the measured 0.12928 ± 0.00023. In the Standard Model, m_H is a free parameter: there is no formula for the Higgs mass, anywhere. This is a postdiction (m_H is already measured) and the paper treats it as such: the full look-elsewhere analysis (1134 scanned closed forms) is published with it.

A single measurement will decide between the two theories

The referee is the di-Higgs rate — how often a collision produces a pair of Higgs bosons (never yet observed: roughly a thousand times rarer than single-Higgs production). It is the only process sensitive to the self-coupling κ_λ, hence to the shape of the potential — measuring it reads the third derivative of the scalar potential.

The joint TQNT signature — κ = 1 everywhere at tree level, κ_λ = 5/3, di-Higgs at half the rate, vanishing invisible width — is reproduced neither by the Standard Model (κ_λ = 1) nor by its usual extensions (which shift the tree couplings along with the self-coupling).

The alternatives already executed by the data

Every internal variant of the construction yields a different Higgs mass — and the measurement decides: