Tag Archives: virtual_particles

Higgs Symposium: A More Careful Summary

Posted on January 17, 2013 | 4 Comments

My rather hasty, breathless and inconsistent summaries (#1, #2 and #3) of last week’s talks at the excellent Higgs Symposium (held at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics) clearly had their limitations.  So I thought it might be useful to give a more organized overview, with more careful language appropriate for non-expert readers, of our current knowledge and ignorance concerning the recently discovered Higgs-like particle (which most of us do believe is a Higgs particle of some type, though not necessarily of the simplest, “Standard Model” type.)

I’m therefore writing an article that tries to put the questions about the Higgs-like particle into a sensible order, and then draws upon the talks that were given at the Symposium to provide the current best answers. About half of the article is done, and you’re welcome to read it.  Due to other commitments, I won’t probably get back to finish it until next week.  But “Part 1″ is long enough that it will take some time for most readers to absorb anyway…

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Posted in Higgs, LHC Background Info, Particle Physics

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Is Supersymmetry Ruled Out Yet?

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 17 Comments

[A Heads Up: I'm giving a public lecture about the LHC on Saturday, April 28th, 1 p.m. New York time/10 a.m. Pacific, through the MICA Popular Talks series, held online at the Large Auditorium on StellaNova, Second Life; should you miss it, both audio and slides will be posted for you to look at later.]

Is supersymmetry, as a symmetry that might explain some of the puzzling aspects of particle physics at the energy scales accessible to the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], ruled out yet? If the only thing you’re interested in is the answer to precisely that question, let me not waste your time: the answer is “not yet”. But a more interesting answer is that many simple variants of supersymmetry are either ruled out or near death.

Still, the problem with supersymmetry — and indeed with any really good idea, such as extra dimensions, or a composite Higgs particle — is that such a basic idea typically can be realized in many different ways. Pizza is a great idea too, but there are a million ways to make one, so you can’t conclude that nobody makes pizza in town just because you can’t smell tomatoes. Similarly, to rule out supersymmetry as an idea, you can’t be satisfied by ruling out the most popular forms of supersymmetry that theorists have invented; you have to rule out all its possible variants. This will take a while, probably a decade.

That said, many of the simplest and popular variants of supersymmetry no longer work very well or at all. This is because of two things: (click here to read the rest of the article.)

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Posted in LHC Background Info, LHC News

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Another Speed Bump for Superluminal Neutrinos

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 28 Comments

Here’s another major strike against the OPERA experiment’s claim of superluminal neutrinos, in addition to the Cohen-Glashow argument I described last week. It comes from a very natural place: the weak nuclear force. The theory (i.e. the equations) that we use, with great success, to predict the behavior of the weak nuclear force inextricably links some of the properties of neutrinos and charged leptons (electrons, muons and taus.) Because of this linkage, you simply can’t make neutrinos travel faster than light without making electrons do it too — by a smaller amount, to be sure, but still bigger than a part in a billion. And it turns out the effect is large enough that it should already have been detected by existing experiments, putting OPERA’s result further in doubt. Continue reading →

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Posted in Particle Physics

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Virtual Particles: Not Particles At All

Posted on October 10, 2011 | 34 Comments

Among the many tricky concepts which the layperson has to grapple with when learning about particle physics is something called “virtual particles”, which show up in cute pictures called “Feynman diagrams” along with “real particles”.  In most books for the public, some words are mumbled about the uncertainty principle and how virtual particles are particles that exist for a short time and then disappear.  Well, this isn’t really wrong, and it is the language that physicists use.  But I have found that the language is so misleading for non-experts that it leads to many confusions among my readers.   For this reason, I’ve taken a different tack in this pedagogical article, with the thinking that the most important thing for a layperson to understand about virtual particles is that they really are not particles at all, despite the name, and they don’t behave that much like them.  They are more of a generalized disturbance in a field, while a real particle, a nice ripple in a field, is a special one.

Why would you want to read this article?  Because in addition to the Cohen-Glashow argument against the OPERA experiment’s result on superluminal neutrinos, which appeals to a process similar to Cerenkov radiation, there’s a more powerful, but more subtle, argument that involves virtual particles.  I’ll explain that in my next post.

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Posted in Particle Physics

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