Of Particular Significance

Author: Matt Strassler

New Article on the Non-Zero Value of the Higgs Field

Following on my series of articles on Fields and Particles, I’m building my next series of articles, on How the Higgs Field Works. (These sets of articles require a little math and physics background, the sort you’d get in your first few months of a beginning university or pre-university physics class.)

The first article in the new series was an overview of The Basic Idea behind how the Higgs field works. I recently revised it to make it easier to read.

The next article, just completed, is about why and how the Higgs field becomes non-zero — to the extent that we understand it. (The following article will explain how the Higgs particle arises.)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 17, 2012

String Enthusiasts, Take Note(s)

It’s not every day that a group of young people strikes a chord in the world of strings. But one of the great things about New York is you’re just as likely to find them showing their stuff in a back room of a bar, or in someone’s living room, as you are in a famous hall with a big audience.

The Amphion String Quartet is making the rounds of the small spaces and hidden gems of New York City venues, but they’ve already been noticed: they’ve been selected to be among the young members (so-called CMS 2) of the famous Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center next year, a real mark of honor. On Sunday, they gave vigorous and exciting performances of Wolf, Janacek, Gershwin and Mendelssohn in the tiny back room at barbès, a little bar in Brooklyn. Go hear them before they’re well-known and ticket prices triple! Fortunately, they’re playing a lot over the next week and over coming months. Physicists at Brookhaven National Lab, take note: they are playing at the lab tomorrow, Wednesday the 17th; one link says noon, another 3 pm, so I’m not sure of the actual time.

Not sure whether to trust me? You don’t have to. Listen, or watch, for yourself. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

[p.s. A trusted friend also recommends the Momenta Quartet.]

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 16, 2012

Why the Higgs and Gravity are Unrelated

One of the questions I get most often from my readers is this:

Since gravity pulls on things proportional to their mass, and since the Higgs field is responsible for giving everything its mass, there obviously must be a deep connection between the Higgs and gravity… right?

It’s a very reasonable guess, but — it turns out to be completely wrong. The problem is that this statement combines a 17th century notion of gravity, long ago revised, with an overly simplified version of a late-20th century notion of where masses of various particles comes from. I’ve finally produced the Higgs FAQ version 2.0, intended for non-experts with little background in the subject, and as part of that, I’ve answered this question. But since the question is so common, I thought I’d also put the answer in a post of its own.

As preface, let me bring out my professorial training and correct the question above with a red pen:

Since gravity pulls on things proportional to their ~~mass~~ to a combination of their energy and momentum, and since the Higgs field is responsible of giving ~~everything~~ not everything, just the known elementary particles excepting the Higgs particle itself ~~its~~ mass, there ~~obviously must be a deep connection~~ between the Higgs and gravity… ~~right?~~ wrong.

Now let me explain these corrections one by one. (more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 15, 2012

Why the Higgs Crew Waits for a Nobel

I was busy with some personal issues over the past few weeks, so I hadn’t even really been following the rampant speculation about the Nobel Prize for this year. Apparently a lot of people (including some of my colleagues) thought that the July discovery, at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] experiments ATLAS and CMS, of a new particle resembling the long-sought Higgs particle would generate a Nobel Prize in 2012 for Peter Higgs and for the other physicists who predicted the existence of such a particle.

Well, I never thought this notion was very plausible; I was confident it wouldn’t happen before 2013. And that is for several reasons.

The first and most important is that although the evidence that a new particle has been found is very strong, the evidence that it is a Higgs particle of some type (which I’ll describe below) is still only moderate. Personally, I’m convinced that the new particle is a Higgs particle, but that is based partly on the evidence from the data and partly on theoretical prejudice — on my knowledge of theoretical physics and of what the alternatives to the Higgs-particle interpretation of the data are. If I’m wrong, too bad for me, but no harm done. However, the Nobel Prize committee is making a permanent, irrevocable award for the history books, and the bar for evidence from the data alone should be very high. Now here’s the key point: by March 2013 at the latest, the data from all of 2012 will have been analyzed. The amount of data that will be available by then will be about three times as much as was available in July 2012 — enough to change the current moderate evidence to strong evidence, if in fact we’re dealing with a Higgs particle of some type. The Nobel Prize committee is surely well aware of this — that by next year the situation is likely to have qualitatively changed, with the evidence beyond controversy. So it makes sense to wait until 2013, when the case is likely to be closed. (more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 11, 2012

Creating a New Particle from the Annihilation of Two Others

[Long silence should be over for now; personal issues had to take precedence for a little while.]

Back to building up articles on how the Higgs field works! As part of the necessary background, I’ve added another general article on how particles and fields interact with each other to my series on Particles and Fields (with a little math — first-year university level.)

This one explains, among other things, how a small modification of the equations of motion for fields allows two particles of one type to annihilate and create a third one of a different type. Examples of such phenomena include the collision and annihilation of a quark and an antiquark to form a Z particle, or the collision and annihilation of two gluons to form a Higgs particle. Particle decay is often just the time-reversed process.

So this is one of the most important articles, and one of the most sophisticated, to appear on this website so far. Although there are a couple of animations to help you visualize what is going on, to understand the text you will want to have read the other articles in the Particles and Fields series first.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 10, 2012

Quantum Physics Is Very Real

Just ask the Nobel Prize committee: is quantum physics some sort of speculative new science? (A smart educated woman asked me, just a week ago, `What do you think about that quantum physics stuff?’, as though it were in the same category as theories of consciousness, speculations about the origin of life, and string theory.) No way: it’s all over your computers and cell phones; it’s in many modern light bulbs; it’s the laser that reads the prices at the grocery store and your ticket at a concert; it’s the heart of the best timepieces and the eyes of the best microscopes; it’s what makes solids solid and liquids flow, and powers chemical reactions and radioactivity; it’s probably playing a big role in biology that we’re just starting to understand; and it’s sunshine and moonlight and the glowing auroras borealis and australis. It’s the foundation and fabric of your world.

And though it may be bizarre, it is by no means abstract. Maybe in the early 1930s one could still say it was abstract; but already for many decades particle physicists have passively observed individual particles, one at a time, behaving in quantum mechanical ways. Today scientists can control individual quantum objects, things whose behavior can only be predicted by accepting the odd rules and counter-intuitive implications of our quantum world. In particular, physicists have learned to capture and manipulate individual photons (particles of light), atoms, and ions (atoms with an electron removed or added, to make them electrically charged — see the Figure below.) It is for their work advancing these capabilities, making possible new classes of experiments and opening up the potential for new technologies, that Serge Haroche and David Wineland have won the Nobel Prize for 2012. Read about it here (brief press release or summary for non-technical readers)… using your preferred quantum-mechanical device.

BerylliumIons — Light emitted from three individual ions of Beryllium, trapped and held in place for an extended period of time. (National Institute of Standards and Technology image gallery.)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 9, 2012

A Brief Tour of Resonance

I’ve just written a brief article on resonance, described in words (without math) and illustrated using an animated figure.

I’ve done this now because I need it as a reference for upcoming articles in my series on how the Higgs Field works (which will be readable by those who’ve gone through my Particles and Fields [with a little math] articles). I’ve already put out the first of those articles, which outlines the basic idea of how the Higgs field gives mass to other particles. [I am considering simplifying it further, based on your questions and suggestions; not everything in there may really be necessary for a first reading.] Among the things I will be explaining next is how, in the equations of motion for the fields of nature, extra terms containing two or more fields (which play a central role in how the Higgs field works) are universally responsible for the interesting processes of particle physics — creation of particles, decay of particles, scattering of particles, and formation of structure, including hadrons (such as protons and neutrons), atomic nuclei and atoms. Stay tuned for that stuff next week.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 28, 2012

How the Higgs Field Does Its Thing

Last week I finished up a set of articles explaining what Fields and “Particles” are. These articles require a small amount of math and physics, the sort you’d get in an advanced pre-university or a beginning university course.

[Articles with no technical requirements will come soon; in the meantime, try my widely read article on Why the Higgs Particle Matters.]

The Particles and Fields articles are a prerequisite to the next set of articles, which will explain what the (simplest type of) Higgs field is and how it does what it does. The first article, just completed, outlines the basic idea. Future articles to appear over coming days and weeks will fill in many details.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 24, 2012

Two Major Steps Forward

Apologies to those who’ve been asking questions: I’ve been away from the website for a few days (family matters) and have not been able to keep up with comments. I will try to catch up over the coming day or two.

But I do have two pieces of good news.

First, I gave a public lecture over the weekend, on-line, called “The Quest for the Higgs”, which I believe many of my readers will find at the right level. Because of some technical difficulties with the sound recording, I didn’t immediately recommend that you listen; but those problems are now fixed and the sound is pretty good. The audio is to be found here at BlogTalkRadio, through the Virtually Speaking Science series; on that website, there’s a link to the slides accompanying the talk, or you can just click here to get them. [Note the slides are under copyright; please ask permission before reproducing or using ideas you find therein.]

Second, the long-awaited final article in the series on Particles and Fields (with a little math) has arrived.

As a bonus, you can then find out what the key technical difference is between bosons and fermions (the consequences of this difference are described, without technicalities, here.)

Next month: a series of articles on How the Higgs Field Works.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 13, 2012

What Fields Are (& a Public Talk Saturday)

To the five articles in my very-slightly-mathy series on Fields and Particles [sorry, the non-mathy series will be probably appear a couple of months from now] I have now added a 6th:

Meanwhile, I remind you that I’m giving a talk on-line, about The Quest for the Higgs Particle. No math required there. (Saturday, September 8th, 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. You’ll need a Second Life viewer to watch it live. Should you miss it, both the audio and the slides will be posted later for you to look at.) And also, if you missed my colleague Sean Carroll being interviewed about his new book and the science behind the Higgs Discovery, an opportunity I recommended to you yesterday, all is not lost; you can hear it here.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 7, 2012

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