The discovery of a Higgs particle is possible in a variety of search channels at the LHC. However, the true identity of any putative Higgs boson will, at first, remain ambiguous until one has experimentally excluded other possible assignments of quantum numbers and couplings. We quantify the degree to which one can discriminate a standard model Higgs boson from “look-alikes” at, or close to, the moment of discovery at the LHC. We focus on the fully-reconstructible golden decay mode to a pair of $Z$ bosons and a four-lepton final state. Considering both on-shell and off-shell $Z$’s, we show how to utilize the full decay information from the events, including the distributions and correlations of the five relevant angular variables. We demonstrate how the finite phase space acceptance of any LHC detector sculpts the decay distributions, a feature neglected in previous studies. We use likelihood ratios to discriminate a standard model Higgs from look-alikes with other spins or nonstandard parity, $CP$, or form factors. For a resonance mass of $200\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$, we achieve a median discrimination significance of $3\sigma$ with as few as 19 events, and even better discrimination for the off-shell decays of a $145\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ resonance.

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