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During the current pandemic shutdown, everyone has had to make decisions-many of which haven't been easy. For the first time in my life, I experienced what were previously unthinkable-airplanes being grounded, cars being off the roads, all classes and meetings being held virtually. The surreal experience has propelled me to think more deeply about what I do and why it is so important to push forward with doing better materials science to enable breakthroughs in energy technologies and to ensure a robust supply chain of relevant materials for the world.

During the current pandemic shutdown, everyone has had to make decisions-many of which haven't been easy. For the first time in my life, I experienced what were previously unthinkable-airplanes being grounded, cars being off the roads, all classes and meetings being held virtually. The surreal experience has propelled me to think more deeply about what I do and why it is so important to push forward with doing better materials science to enable breakthroughs in energy technologies and to ensure a robust supply chain of relevant materials for the world.

We explore the coupling of the strange quark to the state of mass close to 126 GeV recently observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. An enhanced coupling relative to the expectations for a SM Higgs has the effect of increasing both the inclusive production cross section and the partial decay width into jets. For very large modifications, the latter dominates and the net rate into non-jet decay modes such as diphotons is suppressed, with the result that one can use observations of the diphoton decay mode to place an upper limit on the strange quark coupling. We find that the current observations of the diphoton decay mode imply that the coupling of the new resonance to strange quarks can be at most ∼ 50 times the SM expectation at the 95% C.L., if one assumes at most a O(1) modification of the coupling to gluons. © 2013 SISSA.

We explore the coupling of the strange quark to the state of mass close to 126 GeV recently observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. An enhanced coupling relative to the expectations for a SM Higgs has the effect of increasing both the inclusive production cross section and the partial decay width into jets. For very large modifications, the latter dominates and the net rate into non-jet decay modes such as diphotons is suppressed, with the result that one can use observations of the diphoton decay mode to place an upper limit on the strange quark coupling. We find that the current observations of the diphoton decay mode imply that the coupling of the new resonance to strange quarks can be at most ∼ 50 times the SM expectation at the 95% C.L., if one assumes at most a O(1) modification of the coupling to gluons. © 2013 SISSA.