Comment on "Accumulating Evidence for the Associate Production of a Neutral Scalar with Mass around 151 GeV"

A recent paper [2109.02650] 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 151 GeV. 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 https://github.com/andrewfowlie/accumulating_evidence.

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