Here’s an article intended to give a layperson a sense for why so many types of particles — most of them, in fact — decay away almost instantly, forcing us to discover them through various types of trickery. This is relevant in the search for the Higgs particle, which decays away far too quickly to observe directly. (See the Higgs FAQ, the video clips from my recent public talk, or the article about recent hints of the Higgs for more info.)
Blog – Of Particular Significance
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON August 4, 2011
On Tuesday, the New York Times had an article on the Higgs particle search. Not bad, and does quote relevant people, but just a little bit thin on content. If you want some actual content, try my article on the hints of the Higgs particle.
Also, the article falls into the common mistake of not distinguishing “The Higgs particle” from “The Standard Model Higgs particle.” One paragraph says
The Higgs boson is the keystone and last undiscovered piece of the so-called Standard Model, a suite of equations that agrees with all the experiments physicists have been able to do so far in the laboratory. If the Higgs boson does not exist, theorists will have to go back to their blackboards.
If you conflate the general with the specific, you will at some point down the line end up very confused about what the LHC is trying to do and what its results do and don’t mean. It would be good for the public if the NY Times reporter would read the Higgs FAQ before phrasing a statement like this. A more correct statement is:
The Standard Model Higgs boson is the keystone and last undiscovered piece of the so-called Standard Model, a suite of equations that agrees with all the experiments physicists have been able to do so far in the laboratory. If the Standard Model Higgs boson does not exist, this will be very exciting for particle physicists, as it will imply (as has been known for decades) that there must be other particles — perhaps multiple Higgs bosons, and/or perhaps other types of particles — that physicists have not yet discovered, but should be able to discover with the LHC.
The spin is pretty different.
And then there’s the generic paragraph about supersymmetry — more or less right, but again with some big missing points. Well, stay tuned at this website for an article or two on supersymmetry, and what we have and haven’t learned about it from the LHC so far.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON August 4, 2011
Just finished my new article on the hints of a Higgs particle. I hope you find it useful! I have tried to explain, in largely non-technical terms,
- how experimentalists at the Large Hadron Collider are looking for the Higgs, using various methods;
- what makes methods of this type easy or difficult, with analogies;
- that the current hints of a Higgs particle rely on the more difficult techniques, making it unclear whether we should trust them;
- that more data over the coming year will bring the simpler techniques into their own, eliminating this problem over time.
I welcome your comments, questions and advice as to how to make this article more transparent to the non-technical reader!
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON July 31, 2011
Ok, the third video clip from my talk at the Secret Science club from March 2011 is now uploaded for your enjoyment. [But watch the other two clips first, it will make it a lot easier to follow!] Learn how to find the Higgs particle! (Or at least the easier ways — an explanation of the harder techniques, some of which are important in the current hints of a Higgs signal, and further details on the easier techniques, will be posted very soon.)
Attentive viewers will notice that in one of my plots of simulated data the Higgs particle has a mass between 140 and 150 GeV. I promise you 🙂 I had no advanced warning of this month’s hints!! […which happen currently to favor this regime…]
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON July 29, 2011
Nice post went up yesterday on the ATLAS experiment’s blog [ATLAS is one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider] from Kyle Cranmer (Professor at New York University) ; as I posted on this blog, Kyle gave Friday’s presentation summarizing ATLAS’s results on the search for the Higgs particle. Kyle is a young star with a special gift for the statistical reasoning that is essential for combining many different measurements together so as to squeeze the maximum knowledge out. His post has some technical parts, but even if you can’t follow the details I still recommend skimming it for the non-technical insights.
Another interesting post went up on the Cosmic Variance blog, by John Conway (Professor at UC Davis [and not to be confused with the mathematician John Conway]). John mentions that ATLAS and CMS (the other big LHC experiment) have observed no sign of quarks being composite (made of other yet smaller things) and have seen no sign of supersymmetry. [I’ll explain supersymmetry on this site soon.] He then goes on to discuss the Higgs search situation (see also here for my initial take.) But I disagree quite strongly with what John has to say about the search for supersymmetry; look at comment #9 in reply to his post for my opinion. John states as a near-fact that we pretty much know now that the super-partners (heavy new particles that are predicted by supersymmetry) of the quarks are heavier than 1 TeV, but I just put a paper out yesterday with Mariangela Lisanti, Philip Schuster and Natalia Toro that contradicts that statement, arguing that the searches performed so far do not by any means cover all the territory, and suggesting that other search strategies need to be added. And I know that there is more unexplored territory that we did not even discuss in our current paper. [I’ll also give a more detailed discussion of our paper’s argument soon.] This is a key job of particle theorists; make sure all the ground gets covered by the experimentalists before they give up and move on!
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON July 28, 2011
On the plane back to the US, I put together a couple of answers to very basic questions about particle physics that I often get from friends and acquaintances who know little or nothing about the subject. I hope you find them interesting!
Note also: my previous post repeated a misquote of the CERN director general (thank you readers.) This is now corrected — though the post’s main content is not changed, just clarified a bit.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON July 27, 2011
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