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The Higgs boson is the first scalar field ever measured that is fundamental rather than composite. How do high-energy physicists determine that a given resonance in the statistics is either a scalar, vector or fermion?

How is the rank of a field inferred from the input data obtained from the detectors? I'm assuming angular momentum plays some part, but I would like to have a better idea or overview about how they go about the calculation.

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How do you know it's fundamental? I mean, we think it is in normal models, but is there experimental evidence from the announcement? – Ron Maimon Jul 5 '12 at 3:58
@RonMaimon, only the insight from theory, i should've mention that we think the Higgs is the first fundamental scalar field discovered – lurscher Jul 5 '12 at 16:12

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This documentary gives a brief analysis from Christopher Pauss (CMS) and Aidan Randle (ATLAS) basically saying that the current experimental data does not exclude yet neither a scalar boson or a rank-2 boson field, although the second alternative would make this definitely not the Higgs (but something entirely different and unexpected)

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