In what sense is the Higgs expected to be discovered

[DrDu]

In what sense is the higgs particle expected to be discovered at the LHC?
I mean, the Higgs field has a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value, so it costs no energy to absorb or emit a higgs boson.Hence what is meant when saying that the expected mass is about 126 GeV?
I suppose one is looking for some excited state or something?

 

[fzero]

It's not an excited state. The physical Higgs field is the degree of freedom as seen in the classical vacuum state that breaks the electroweak symmetry. The SU(2) doublet H is an expansion around the false vacuum at \langle H \rangle =0. The true vacuum is an expansion around \langle H^0\rangle =\upsilon, for which we write

H = \begin{pmatrix} H^+ \\ \upsilon + h \end{pmatrix}.

H^\pm are the degree of freedom that gets "eaten" to generate mass for the EW gauge bosons, while h is the massive Higgs scalar being investigated. The mass of h is set in terms of the parameters of the Higgs potential once you expand using the parametrization above.

 

[DrDu]

Ok, I see. Thank you!

 

[Bill_K]

In other words, yes the Higgs boson is an excited state of the Higgs field.