Status of the fourth fermion generation before ICHEP2012: Higgs data and electroweak precision observables

We perform a global fit of the parameters of the Standard Model with a sequential fourth generation (SM4) to LHC and Tevatron Higgs data and electroweak precision data. We find that the minimal chi-square value of the SM4 is larger than that of the Standard Model with three generations (SM3) by 8 units. We then perform several likelihood ratio tests which compare the the performance of the SM4 and SM3 at describing the measured data. Since the SM3 and SM4 are not nested (i.e. the SM3 can not be considered as a special case of the SM4 with some parameters fixed) the usual analytical formulae for p-values in likelihood ratio tests do not hold. We thus apply a new method to compute these p-values. For a Higgs mass of 126.5 GeV we find that the SM4 is excluded at 3.1 sigma.