The well known LHC experiment, as is well known, only stated that a big mass particle which was, eventually observed there, merely "looked like" a Higgs boson, but, being in some sense a shortly living "particle" resonance, it was not firmly stated that it was really this boson which was observed. So, the following question persists to be yet actual - is this particle, if it was really observed as "a particle', not a resonance, or it was something else?
I can think of two important criteria right away.
First, does it have the same interactions as the predicted Higgs boson? Does it decay like the Higgs is supposed to into two photons, ZZ*, etc? The branching ratios for a resonance would likely differ from those of the Higgs.
Second, is it a scalar particle of positive parity? If I am not mistaken, a resonance in a ground state would likely be a pseudoscalar with negative parity.
I think that the answers to both these questions are strongly in favor of the observabel particle being the Higgs scalar.
in science there is never a 100% certainty. As we continue to learn we sometimes encounter situations in which the underlying paradigm has to be reevaluated. Having said so: we predicted that a particle with unknown mass should exist. Once its mass is known, all its properties are also fixed by the same model. The LHC discovery is in perfect agreement with this prediction. The mass turns out to be 125GeV and all the other properties are in agreement with the subsequent properties. At present we have only a crude knowledge of these properties which will be improved as we continue to collect data and analyse it. It is likely that at a certain point we will start seeing deviations. Yet, the great success up to now implies that a lot of truth has been contained by the reigning theory
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