Excluding a Generic Spin-2 Higgs Impostor

Abstract

We argue that the current experimental data in conjunction with perturbative unitarity considerations exclude the possibility that the LHC 125-126 GeV resonance is a generic massive spin-2 particle of either parity. We analyse tree-level Z-spin-2 elastic scattering and demonstrate that perturbative unitarity breaks down at energies $\Lambda \sim 600$ GeV. Furthermore, we find that W,Z-spin-2 interactions contribute to the electroweak oblique parameters in a way that is in gross disagreement with observations.

Comments: 12 pp, 8 figures; V2: reference added; minor corrections to match published version