In a previous post, I told you about how physicists use computers to study how the strong nuclear force combines certain elementary particles — specifically quarks and anti-quarks and gluons — into hadrons, such as protons and neutrons and pions. Computers can also be used to study certain other phenomena that, because they involve the strong nuclear force where it is truly “strong” [in the technical sense described here], can’t be studied using simpler methods of successive approximation. While computers aren’t a panacea, they do allow some important and difficult questions about the strong nuclear force to be answered with precision.
To do these calculations, physicists study an imaginary world, as I described;
all forces except the strong nuclear force are ignored, and
all particles are forgotten except the gluons and the up, down and strange quarks (and their anti-quarks).
On top of this, the up, down and strange quark masses are typically changed. They are taken larger, which makes the calculations easier, and then gradually reduced towards their small values in the real world.
The Notion of “Effective” Quantum Field Theories
There’s one more interesting method for understanding the strong nuclear force that I haven’t mentioned yet, and it too involves changing the quark masses — making them smaller, rather than larger! And weirdly, this doesn’t involve the equations of the quantum field theory for the quarks, antiquarks and gluons at all. It involves a different quantum field theory altogether — one which says nothing about the quarks and gluons, but instead describes the physics of the hadrons themselves. More precisely, its equations are useful for making predictions about the hadrons of lowest mass — called pions, kaons and etas — and it works for processes
with rather low energy — too low to affect the behavior of the quarks and anti-quarks and gluons inside the pions — and
at rather long distance — too long to detect that the pions have a lot of internal structure.
A week at CERN, the laboratory that hosts the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] (where the Higgs particle was discovered), is always extremely packed, and this one was no exception. It’s very typical that on a given day I’ll have four or five intense one-on-one scientific meetings with colleagues, both theorists and experimenters, and will attend a couple of presentations on hot topics — or perhaps ten, if there’s a conference going on (which is almost always.) Work starts at 9 am and typically ends at 7 pm. And of course I have my own work to do — papers to finish, for instance — so after a break for dinner, I keep working til midnight. Squeezing in time for writing blog posts can be tough under these conditions! But at least it is for very good reasons.
Just this morning I’ve just attended two talks related to a future particle physics collider that people are starting to think seriously about… a collider (currently called T-LEP) that would be built in an 80 kilometer-long [50 mile-long] circular tunnel, and in which electrons and positrons [positron = anti-electron] would be smashed together. The physics program of such a machine would be quite broad, including intensive studies of the four heaviest known particles in nature: the Z particle, the W particle, the Higgs particle and the top quark. Any one of them might reveal secrets when investigated in detail. In fact, T-LEP’s extremely precise measurements, made in the 100-500 GeV = 0.1-0.5 TeV energy range, would be used to check the equations that explain how the Higgs field gives elementary particles their masses to one part in a thousand, and to potentially be indirectly sensitive to effects of unknown particles and forces all the way up to 10-30 TeV energy scales.
After that I had a typical meeting with an experimentalist at the CMS experiment, discussing the many ways that one might still make discoveries using the existing 2011-2012 LHC data. The big concern here is that the LHC experimenters are so busy getting ready for the 2015 run of the LHC that they may not fully exploit the data that they already have.
Greetings from Geneva, and CERN, the laboratory that hosts the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], where the Higgs particle was found by the physicists at the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Between jet lag, preparing a talk for Wednesday, and talking to many experimental and theoretical particle physicists from morning til night, it will be a pretty exhausting week.
The initial purpose of this trip is to participate in a conference held by the LHCb experiment, entitled “Implications of LHCb measurements and future prospects.” Its goal is to bring theoretical particle physicists and LHCb experimenters together, to exchange information about what has been and what can be measured at LHCb.
On this website I’ve mostly written about ATLAS and CMS, partly because LHCb’s measurements are often quite subtle to explain, and partly because the Higgs particle search, the highlight of the early stage of the LHC, was really ATLAS’s and CMS’s task. But this week’s activities gives me a nice opportunity to put the focus on this very interesting experiment, which is quite different from ATLAS and CMS both in its design and in its goals, and to explain its important role.
ATLAS and CMS were built as general purpose detectors, whose first goal was to find the Higgs particle and whose second was to find (potentially rare) signs of any other high-energy processes that are not predicted by the Standard Model, the equations we use to describe all the known particles and forces of nature. Crudely speaking, ATLAS and CMS are ideal for looking for new phenomena in the 100 to 5000 GeV energy range (though we won’t reach the upper end of the range until 2015 and beyond.)
LHCb, by contrast, was built to study in great detail the bottom and charm quarks, and the hadrons(particles made from quarks, anti-quarks and gluons) that contain them. These quarks and their antiquarks are produced in enormous abundance at the LHC. They and the hadrons that contain them have masses in the 1.5 to 10 GeV/c² range… not much heavier than protons, and much lower than what ATLAS and CMS are geared to study. And this is why LHCb has been making crucial high-precision tests of the Standard Model using bottom- and charm-containing hadrons. (Crucial, but not, despite repeated claims by the LHCb press office, capable of ruling out supersymmetry, which no single measurement can possibly do.)
Although this is the rough division of labor among these experiments, it’s too simplistic to describe the experiments this way. ATLAS and CMS can do quite a lot of physics at the low mass range, and in some measurements can compete well with LHCb. Less well-known is that LHCb may be able to do a small but critical set of measurements involving higher energies than is their usual target.
LHCb is very different from ATLAS and CMS in many ways, and the most obvious is its shape. ATLAS and CMS look like giant barrels centered on the location of the proton-proton collisions, and are designed to measure as many particles as possible that are produced in the collision of two protons. LHCb’s shape is more like a wedge, with one end surrounding the collision point.
Left: Cut-away drawing of CMS, which is shaped like a barrel with proton-proton collisions occurring at its center. ATLAS’s shape is similar. Right: Cut-away drawing of LHCb, which is shaped something like a wedge, with collisions occurring at one end.
This shape only allows it to measure those particle that go in the “forward” direction — close to the direction of one of the proton beams. (“Backward” would be near the other beam; the distinction between forward and backward is arbitrary, because the two proton beams have the same properties. “Central” would be far from either beam.) Unlike ATLAS and CMS, LHCb is not used to reconstruct the whole collision; many of the particles produced in the collision go into backward or central regions which LHCb can’t observe. This has some disadvantages, and in particular put LHCb out of the running for the Higgs discovery. But a significant fraction of the bottom and charm quarks produced in proton-proton collisions go “forward” or “backward”, so a forward-looking design is fine if it’s bottom and charm quarks you’re interested in. And such a design is a lot cheaper, too. It also means that LHCb is well positioned to make some other measurements where the forward direction is important. I’ll give you one or two examples later in the week.
To make their measurements of bottom and charm quarks, LHCb makes use of the fact that these quarks decay after about a trillionth of a second (a picosecond) [or longer if, as is commonly the case, there is significant time dilation due to Einstein’s relativity effects on very fast particles]. This is long enough for them to travel a measurable distance — typically a millimeter or more. LHCb is designed to make the measurements of charged particles with terrific precision, allowing them to infer a slight difference between the proton-proton collision point, from which most low-energy charged particles will emerge, and the location where some other charged particles may have been produced in the decay of a bottom hadron or some other particle that travels a millimeter or more before decaying. The ability to do precision “tracking” of the charged particles makes LHCb sensitive to the presence of any as-yet unknown particles that might be produced and then decay after traveling a small or moderate distance. More on that later in the week.
A computer reconstruction of the tracks in a proton-proton collision, as measured by LHCb. Most tracks start at the proton-proton collision point at left, but the two tracks drawn in purple emerge from a different point about 15 millimeters away, the apparent location of the decay of a hadron, whose inferred trajectory is the blue line, and whose mass (measured from the purple tracks) indicates that it contained a bottom quark.
One other thing to know about LHCb; in order to make their precise measurements possible, and to deal with the fact that they don’t observe a whole collision, they can’t afford to have too many collisions going on at once. ATLAS and CMS have been coping with ten to twenty simultaneous proton-proton collisions; this is part of what is known as “pile-up”. But near LHCb the LHC beams are adjusted so that the number of collisions at LHCb is often limited to just one or two or three simultaneous collisions. This has the downside that the amount of data LHCb collected in 2011 was about 1/5 of what ATLAS and CMS each collected, while for 2012 the number was more like 1/10. But LHCb can do a number of things to make up for this lower rate; in particular their trigger system is more forgiving than that of ATLAS or CMS, so there are certain things they can measure using data of a sort that ATLAS and CMS have no choice but to throw away.
Just in case you weren’t convinced by yesterday’s post that the shutdown, following on a sequester and a recession, is doing some real damage to this nation’s scientists, science, and future, here is another link for you.
Jonathan Lilly is a oceanographer, a senior research scientist at NorthWest Research Associates in Redmond, Washington, and I can vouch that he is a first-rate scientist and an excellent blogger. He writes in an article entitled
about a wide range of damaging problems affecting this field of study. What’s nice about this post, compared to my own general one from yesterday, is that he has a lot of specific detail.
Here are some other links, demonstrating the breadth and depth of the impact:
Maybe you think this shutdown isn’t all that bad? Perhaps you’re not talking to scientists, or thinking about their role in society. The effects of the government shutdown continue to ripple outward. Scientific research doesn’t cope well with shutdowns.
In sports, as in science, there are two very different types of heroes. There are the giants who lead the their teams and their sport, winning championships and accolades, for years, and whose fame lives on for decades: the Michael Jordans, the Peles, the Lou Gherigs, the Joe Montanas. And then there are the unlikely heroes, the ones who just happen to have a really good day at a really opportune time; the substitute player who comes on the field for an injured teammate and scores the winning goal in a championship; the fellow who never hits a home run except on the day it counts; the mediocre receiver who turns a short pass into a long touchdown during the Super Bowl. We celebrate both types, in awe of the great ones, and in amused pleasure at the inspiring stories of the unlikely ones.
In science we have giants like Newton, Darwin, Boyle, Galileo… The last few decades of particle physics brought us a few, such as Richard Feynman and Ken Wilson, and others we’ll meet today. Many of these giants received Nobel Prizes. But then we have the gentlemen behind what is commonly known as the Higgs particle — the little ripple in the Higgs field, a special field whose presence and properties assure that many of the elementary particles of nature have mass, and without which ordinary matter, and we ourselves, could not exist. Following discovery of this particle last year, and confirmation that it is indeed a Higgs particle, two of them, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, have been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. Had he lived to see the day, Robert Brout would have been the third.
The paper written by Brout and Englert; the two papers written by Higgs; the paper written by Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble and Carl Hagen; these tiny little documents, a grand total of five and one half printed pages — these were game-winning singles in the bottom of the 9th, soft goals scored with a minute to play, Hail-Mary passes by backup quarterbacks — crucial turning-point papers written by people you would not necessarily have expected to find at the center of things. Brout, Englert, Higgs, Guralnik, Kibble and Hagen are (or rather, in Brout’s case, sadly, were) very fine scientists, intelligent and creative and clever, and their papers, written in 1964 when they were young men, are imperfect but pretty gems. They were lucky: very smart but not extraordinary physicists who just happened to write the right paper at the right time. In each case, they did so
…not by studying the real world but by studying simplified, imaginary worlds, in which it was easier to learn the general lessons they wanted to extract…
…and with no suspicion that their results would instead be applied to a different real-world question: the possibility that the weak nuclear force is associated with photon-like particles, called W and Z, that have a mass.[A photon is a particle of light, has spin=1, and, unlike the W and Z particles, has no mass.]
History in general, and history of science in particular, is always vastly more complex than the simple stories we tell ourselves and our descendants. Making history understandable in a few pages always requires erasing complexities and subtleties that are crucial for making sense of the past. Today, all across the press, there are articles explaining incorrectly what Higgs and the others did and why they did it and what it meant at the time and what it means now. I am afraid I have a few over-simplified articles of my own. But today I’d like to give you a little sense of the complexities, to the extent that I, who wasn’t even alive at the time, can understand them. And also, I want to convey a few important lessons that I think the Hi(gg)story can teach both experts and non-experts. Here are a couple to think about as you read:
1. It is important for theoretical physicists, and others who make mathematical equations that might describe the world, to study and learn from imaginary worlds, especially simple ones. That is because
1a. one can often infer general lessons more easily from simple worlds than from the (often more complicated) real one, and
1b. sometimes an aspect of an imaginary world will turn out to be more real than you expected!
2. One must not assume that research motivated by a particular goal depends upon the achievement of that goal; even if the original goal proves illusory, the results of the research may prove useful or even essential in a completely different arena.
My summary today is based on a reading of the papers themselves, on comments by John Iliopoulos, and on a conversation with Englert, and on reading and hearing Higgs’ own description of the episode.
The story is incompletely but perhaps usefully illustrated in the figure below, which shows a cartoon of how four important scientific stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s came together. They are:
How do superconductors (materials that carry electricity without generating heat) really work?
How does the proton get its mass, and why are pions (the lightest hadrons) so much lighter than protons?
Why do hadrons behave the way they do; specifically, as suggested by J.J. Sakurai(who died rather young, and after whom a famous prize is named), why are there photon-like hadrons, called rho mesons, that have mass?
How does the weak nuclear force work? Specifically, as suggested by Schwinger and developed further by his student Glashow, might it involve photon-like particles (now called W and Z) with mass?
These four questions converged on a question of principle: “how can mass be given to particles?”, and the first, third and fourth were all related to the specific question of “how can mass be given to photon-like particles?’’ This is where the story really begins. [Almost everyone in the story is a giant with a Nobel Prize, indicated with a parenthetic (NPyear).]
My best attempt at a cartoon history…
In 1962, Philip Anderson (NP1977), an expert on (among other things) superconductors, responded to suggestions and questions of Julian Schwinger (NP1965) on the topic of photon-like particles with mass, pointing out that a photon actually gets a mass inside a superconductor, due to what we today would identify as a sort of “Higgs-type’’ field made from pairs of electrons. And he speculated, without showing it mathematically, that very similar ideas could apply to empty space, where Einstein’s relativity principles hold true, and that this could allow elementary photon-like particles in empty space to have mass, if in fact there were a kind of Higgs-type field in empty space.
In all its essential elements, he had the right idea. But since he didn’t put math behind his speculation, not everyone believed him. In fact, in 1964 Walter Gilbert (NP1980 for chemistry, due to work relevant in molecular biology — how’s that for a twist?) even gave a proof that Anderson’s idea couldn’t work in empty space!
But Higgs immediately responded, arguing that Gilbert’s proof had an important loophole, and that photon-like particles could indeed get a mass in empty space.
Meanwhile, about a month earlier than Higgs, and not specifically responding to Anderson and Gilbert, Brout and Englert wrote a paper showing how to get mass for photon-like particles in empty space. They showed this in several types of imaginary worlds, using techniques that were different from Higgs’ and were correct though perhaps not entirely complete.
A second paper by Higgs, written before he was aware of Brout and Englert’s work, gave a simple example, again in an imaginary world, that made all of this much easier to understand… though his example wasn’t perhaps entirely convincing, because he didn’t show much detail. His paper was followed by important theoretical clarifications from Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble that assured that the Brout-Englert and Higgs papers were actually right. The combination of these papers settled the issue, from our modern perspective.
And in the middle of this, as an afterthought added to his second paper only after it was rejected by a journal, Higgs was the first person to mention something that was, for him and the others, almost beside the point — that in the Anderson-Brout-Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble story for how photon-like particles get a mass, there will also generally be a spin-zero particle with a mass: a ripple in the Higgs-type field, which today we call a Higgs-type particle. Not that he said very much! He noted that spin-one (i.e. photon-like) and spin-zero particles would come in unusual combinations. (You have to be an expert to even figure out why that counts as predicting a Higgs-type particle!) Also he wrote the equation that describes how and why the Higgs-type particle arises, and noted how to calculate the particle’s mass from other quantities. But that was it. There was nothing about how the particle would behave, or how to discover it in the imaginary worlds that he was considering; direct application to experiment, even in an imaginary world, wasn’t his priority in these papers.
In his second paper, Higgs considers a simple imaginary world with just a photon-like particle and a Higgs-type field. Equation 2b is the first place the Higgs-type particle explicitly appears in the context of giving photon-like particles a mass (equation 2c). From Physical Review Letters, Volume 13, page 508
About the “Higgs-type” particle, Anderson says nothing; Brout and Englert say nothing; Guralnik et al. say something very brief that’s irrelevant in any imaginable real-world application. Why the silence? Perhaps because it was too obvious to be worth mentioning? When what you’re doing is pointing out something really “important’’ — that photon-like particles can have a mass after all — the spin-zero particle’s existence is so obvious but so irrelevant to your goal that it hardly deserves comment. And that’s indeed why Higgs added it only as an afterthought, to make the paper a bit less abstract and a bit easier for a journal to publish. None of them could have imagined the hoopla and public excitement that, five decades later, would surround the attempt to discover a particle of this type, whose specific form in the real world none of them wrote down.
In the minds of these authors, any near-term application of their ideas would probably be to hadrons, perhaps specifically Sakurai’s theory of hadrons, which in 1960 predicted the “rho mesons”, which are photon-like hadrons with mass, and had been discovered in 1961. Anderson, Brout-Englert and Higgs specifically mention hadrons at certain moments. But none of them actually considered the real hadrons of nature, as they were just trying to make points of principle; and in any case, the ideas that they developed did not apply to hadrons at all. (Well, actually, that’s not quite true, but the connection is too roundabout to discuss here.) Sakurai’s ideas had an element of truth, but fundamentally led to a dead end. The rho mesons get their mass in another way.
Meanwhile, none of these people wrote down anything resembling the Higgs field which we know today — the one that is crucial for our very existence — so they certainly didn’t directly predict the Higgs particle that was discovered in 2012. It was Steven Weinberg (NP1979) in 1967, and Abdus Salam (NP1979) in 1968, who did that. (And it was Weinberg who stuck Higgs’ name on the field and particle, so that everyone else was forgotten.) These giants combined
the ideas of Higgs and the others about how to give mass to photon-like particles using a Higgs-type field, with its Higgs-type particle as a consequence…
…with the 1960 work of Sheldon Glashow (NP1979), Schwinger’s student, who like Schwinger proposed the weak nuclear force was due to photon-like particles with mass,…
…and with the 1960-1961 work of Murray Gell-Man (NP1969) and Maurice Levy and of Yoichiro Nambu (NP2008) and Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, who showed how proton-like or electron-like particles could get mass from what we’d now call Higgs-type fields.
The Hi(gg)story is populated with giants. I’m afraid my attempt to tell the story has giant holes to match. But as far as the Higgs particle that was discovered last year at the Large Hadron Collider, the unlikely heroes of the story are the relatively ordinary scientists who slipped in between the giants and actually scored the goals.
