Of Particular Significance

Meanwhile, On the Other Side of the Planet

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON 11/09/2012

This week I’ve escaped the power outages, the gasoline shortages, the cold and the snow of my home town, and have been visiting warm and humid Hong Kong.  Today I gave a colloquium (same one, more or less, as I gave last month at the University of Toronto, on-line here) at the physics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).  CUHK is one of three universities in Hong Kong that are banding together to try to establish a particle physics presence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and beyond.

I’m in Asia because of next week’s Hadron Collider Physics Symposium (HCP 2012), a conference that will be held in Kyoto, Japan.  Among other things, many new measurements using 2012 data from the LHC will be presented at this conference, along with updates of the measurements of the properties of the new Higgs-like particle whose discovery was announced in July.  Stay tuned for posts on the new LHC results next week.

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11 Responses

  1. Hi professor! Wishing you a successful and enjoyable stay in Hong Kong. The Chinese are marvelous people, while the superpowers closely guard their technologies with patents the Chinese are selling theirs on the street. I once had a miniature fm radio amazingly batteries and head phone included for a dollar! Laser pointer.. isn’t that what bose and eintein helped to develop? pinky size laser batteries included mine for 5 dollars! I still wonder how the Chinese could possibly do that selling high technologies at dirt cheap prices. The cuisine is superb, but on the exotic side don’t trust the English translation, it will be wise to ask your host exactly what it is.. enjoy! 😀

  2. Higgs boson is a force carrier. Its change in helicity occurs(appearance of mass) due to “soaks up(electroweak symmetry breaking)” in Higgs vev(potential energy of SM)?. This tiny missing mass, the problem in hierarchy problem could be compared with the “different chirality(ies)” of tiny neutrino mass?- this helicity change or appearance of mass may be due to low frequency on Higgs vev(in PE of SM)- creats cherenkov effect in Higgs field? – because vev is relative(non zero) but masses of neutrino and Higgs boson were nearly non relative(zero).

  3. Mass appear if there is helicity change and same chirality under special relativity. But SM adjusted to hierarchy problem, make Higgs vev “soaks up” the different chiralities, present them appears as same- and helicity change by electroweak symmetry breaking?

  4. Mass patterns and the flavour problem: Would quarks being heavier than leptons indicate GUT is on the right track.

  5. If the speed of the light is not an universal constant, special relativity didn’t occur. there will be no helicity change- and mass could not appear?

    Mass of a particle differs for same person from different reference frame
    – helicity change?
    All observers in valid reference frames would measure to be the same mass for a given particle
    – same Chirality?

    The particles with different chiralities are really different particles. So helicity is relative but chirality is non relative and inherent, intrinsic property of the particle whether it is massive or massless?.

    When everything is massless, the chirality and helicity of a particle are the same. If mass has to appear the change between chirality and helicity could only possible at the presence of Higgs field(bumping against vev)- Particles which interact more strongly with the Higgs have more mass, while particles which interact weakly with the Higgs have less mass.

    What is electroweak symmetry breaking?

    1. You could watch the first lecture of this online course:

      https://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/supersymmetry-grand-unification/id384233338?mt=10#ls=1

      It is about renormalization and therein Lenny Susskind nicely explains mass renormalization, why the corrections to the masses of fermions are not a problem, and that the small observed mass of the higgs particle is the only hierarchy problem in the SM.
      The mass term of a fermion mixes the left and right handed state of the particle, do you mean this by the last sentence? Lenny Susskind explains this too in the first lecture.

      Cheers

      1. Dilaton, thanks for this link.

        I’ve just been trying to find an introduction to renormalization / regularization. I didn’t find this set of lectures by prof Susskind on youtube. It seem to be itunes only – so ipad time.

  6. Should the data presented at HCP2012 confirm the SM deviation of H decay to two photons, what is the leading theoretical explanation?

  7. Hi Matt thanks for update – a very busy man. Is anyone going to ask the question is the Higgs like indicated a possible Di Pole fermion? Or is that stating the obvious and immediately discounted? There has not been much traffic here I was beginning to think I was blocked….<

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