I have two very different presentations to give this week, on two very similar topics. First I’m going to the LHC Physics Center [LPC], located at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, host of the now-defunct Tevatron accelerator, the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. The LPC is the local hub for the United States wing of the CMS experiment, one of the two general-purpose experiments at the LHC. [CMS, along with ATLAS, is where the Higgs particle was discovered.] The meeting I’m attending is about supersymmetry, although that’s just its title, really; many of the talks will have implications that go well beyond that specific subject, exploring more generally what we have and still could search for in the LHC’s existing and future data. I’ll be giving a talk for experts on what we do and don’t know currently about one class of supersymmetry variants, and what we should be perhaps be trying to do next to cover cases that aren’t yet well-explored.
Second, I’ll be going to Argonne National Laboratory, to give a talk for the scientists there, most of whom are not particle physicists, about what we have learned so far about nature from the LHC’s current data, and what the big puzzles and challenges are for the future. So that will be a talk for non-expert scientists, which requires a completely different approach.
Both presentations are more-or-less new and will require quite a bit of work on my part, so don’t be surprised if posts and replies to comments are a little short on details this week…
For Non-Experts Who've Read a Bit About Particle Physics
I spent yesterday, and am spending today, at Princeton University, participating in a workshop that brings together a group of experts from the CMS experiment, one of the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (where the Higgs particle was discovered.) They’ve invited me, along with a few other theoretical physicists, to speak to them about additional strategies they might use in searching for phenomena that are not expected to occur within the Standard Model (the equations we use to describe the known elementary particles and forces.) This sort of “consulting” is one of the roles of theorists like me. It involves combining a broad knowledge of the surprises nature might have in store for us with a comprehensive understanding of what CMS and its competitor ATLAS (as well as other experiments at and outside the LHC) have and have not searched for already.
Yesterday afternoon’s back-and-forth between the theorists and the experimentalists was focused on signals that are very hard to detect directly, such as (still hypothetical) dark matter particles. These could perhaps be produced in the LHC’s proton-proton collisions, but could then go undetected, because (like neutrinos) they pass without hitting anything inside of CMS. But even though we can’t detect these particles directly, we can sometimes tell indirectly that they’re present, if the collision simultaneously makes something else that recoils sharply away from them. That sometime else could be a photon (i.e. a particle of light) or a jet (the spray of particles that tells you that a high-energy gluon or quark was produced) or perhaps something else. There was a lot of interesting discussion about the various possible approaches to searching for such signals more effectively, and about how the trigger strategy might need to be adjusted in 2015, when the LHC starts taking data again at higher energy per collision, so that CMS remains maximally sensitive to their presence. Clearly there is much more work to do on this problem.
[Apologies: due to a computer glitch, the figure in the original version of this post was not the most up-to-date, and had typos, now fixed.]
On Tuesday, the New York Times Editorial page ran an Op-Ed about dark matter… and although it could have been worse, it could certainly have been better. I do wonder why these folks don’t just call up an expert and confirm that they’ve actually got it right, before they mislead the public and give scientists a combination of a few giggles and a headache.
Here is the last paragraph from the Times:
“This experiment is probing a major hole in the way we understand the cosmos. Roughly speaking, the force of gravity in the universe can be explained only by a corresponding amount of mass, or matter. Some undiscovered mass — dark matter — must exist in order to explain gravity, but no one has seen any traces of it. Those traces, when they are finally found, will be exotic particles left over from the Big Bang. In the tale we tell about everything we know, scientists have now brought us to the edge of the deep, dark woods. They, and we, are waiting eagerly to see how the rest of the story goes.”
Ok, out comes the professorial red pen.
First, a relatively minor point of order. “…the force of gravity in the universe can be explained only by a corresponding amount of mass, or matter…” This isn’t great writing, because mass and matter are not the same thing. Matter is a type of substance. Mass is a property that substance (including ordinary matter, such as tables and planets) can have. Mass and matter are as different as apples and applets. You can read about these distinctions here, if you like. The author is trying to evade this distinction to keep things simple: the more correct statement is that gravity (in simple circumstances) is a force exerted by things (including ordinary matter) that have mass.
But here’s the real offending remark: “Some undiscovered mass — dark matter — must exist in order to explain gravity, but no one has seen any traces of it.” Dark matter is most certainly not needed to “explain gravity” in some general way; there’s not one bit of truth in that remark. For instance, the gravitational pull of the sun on the earth (and vice versa), and the pull of the earth on you and me (and vice versa), has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with dark matter, nor is dark matter needed to explain it.
What the author should have said is: since the 1960s we have known that gravitational forces on large astronomical scales seem to be stronger than we can account for, and so either our equations for gravity are wrong or there is matter out there, pulling on things gravitationally, that we cannot see with any type of telescope. The reason the latter possibility is taken more seriously than the former by most experts is that attempts to modify gravity have not led to a convincing case, while the evidence for additional “dark” matter has grown very strong over recent decades.
Here’s one of the several arguments that suggest the possibility of dark matter… the simplest to explain. Experts study the motions of the stars in our own galaxy — the star city known as the Milky Way — and also study the motions of stars in other galaxies. [The overall motions of galaxies themselves, inside giant clusters of galaxies which can be found in deep space, are also studied.] Now what we ask is this; see Figure 1. Supposing all of the matter that is out there in the universe is of a type that we can see in one way or another: stars, gas, dust of various types. Then we can figure out, just by looking with a telescope and doing simple calculations, roughly how much measurable matter is in each galaxy, how much mass that matter has, and where it is distributed inside the galaxy. We can next use that information to figure out how hard that matter pulls on other matter, via the force of gravity. And finally — crucially! — we can calculate how fast that pull will make the matter move, on average. And what do we find when we measure how fast the stars are moving? Our calculations based on the matter that we can see are wrong. We find that the stars in the outer edges of a galaxy, and the galaxies inside clusters, are moving much, much faster than our calculation predicts. (This was discovered in the 1960s by Vera Rubin and Kent Ford.) It’s as though they’re being pulled on by something unseen — as though the gravity on the stars due to the rest of the galaxy is stronger than we’ve guessed. Why is this happening?
Fig. 1: One of several lines of evidence in favor of the hypothesis of dark matter is that stars in the outer regions of galaxies move much faster than would be the case if the galaxy was made only from what we can see.
One possibility is that there is matter out there that we can’t see, a lot of it, and that matter is inside galaxies and inside clusters of galaxies, exerting a pull that we haven’t accounted for properly. A huge “halo” of dark matter, in this view, surrounds every galaxy (Figure 2).
Clearly, this isn’t the only logical possibility. Another option is that there could be something wrong with our understanding of gravity. Or there could be some other new force that we don’t know about yet that has nothing to do with gravity. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the very laws of motion that we use. But all attempts to make sensible suggestions along these lines have gradually run into conflicts with astronomical observations over the recent decades.
Fig. 2: The visible part of every galaxy is believed to lie roughly at the center of a much larger halo of dark matter.
Meanwhile, during those last few decades, a simple version of the “dark matter” hypothesis has passed test after test, some of these tests being very complex and subtle. For example, in Einstein’s theory of gravity, gravity pulls on light, and can bend it much the same way that the lenses in eyeglasses bend light. A galaxy or galaxy cluster can serve to magnify objects behind it, and by studying these lensing effects, we again conclude there’s far more matter in galaxies and in clusters than we can see. And there are other arguments too, which I won’t cover now.
So while an explanation for the fast motion of stars inside galaxies, and galaxies inside clusters, isn’t 100% sure to be dark matter, it’s now, after many years of study, in the high 90%s. Don’t let anyone tell you that scientists rushed to judgment about this; it has been studied for decades, and I can tell you from experience that there’s a lot more consensus now than there was when I was an beginning undergraduate 30 years ago.
“Those traces, when they are finally found, will be exotic particles left over from the Big Bang.” Will they? Will the dark matter turn out to be particles from the Big Bang? Not necessarily. We know that’s one possibility, but it’s not the only one. Since I explained this point last week, I’ll just refer you to that post.
Now here come the big meta-questions: should the New York Times be more careful about what it puts on its editorial page? Should its editors, who are not scientists, talk broadly about a subtle scientific topic without fact-checking with an expert? What are the costs and benefits when they put out oversimplified, and in some ways actually false, information about science on their editorial page?
I’ve explained in earlier posts how we can calculate many things in the quantum field theory that is known as the “Standard Model” of particle physics, itself an amalgam of three, simpler quantum field theories.
the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force are turned off,
the electron, muon, tau, neutrinos, W, Z and Higgs particles are ignored
the three heavier types of quarks are also ignored
(See Figure 4 of Part 4 for more details.) This makes the calculations a lot simpler. And their results allow us, for instance, to understand why quarks and anti-quarks and gluons form the more complex particles called hadrons, of which protons and neutrons are just a couple of examples. Unfortunately, computer simulations still are nowhere near powerful enough for the calculation of some of the most interesting processes in nature… and won’t be for a long time.
Fig 1: The idealized, imaginary world whose quantum field theory is used to make computer simulations of the real-world strong-nuclear force.
This brings us to today’s story. Our success with the Standard Model might give you the impression that we basically understand quantum field theory and how to make predictions using it, with a few exceptions. But this would be far, far from the truth. As far as we can tell, much (if not most) of quantum field theory remains deeply mysterious. (more…)
Last week, the LUX experiment reported its results in its search for the dark matter that (speaking roughly) makes up 25% of the stuff in the universe (see here for the first report and here for some Q&A). [See this article, specifically the “Dark Matter Underfoot” section, for some nontechnical discussion about how experiments like LUX work.] Shortly thereafter, a number of articles in the media made a big deal out of the fact that, simultaneously,
the LUX experiment did not find evidence of dark matter
yet scientists at the LUX experiment appeared to be quite happy
as though this was contradictory and mystifying. Actually, if you think about it carefully, this is perfectly normal and typical, and not the slightest bit surprising. But to make sense of it, you do also have to understand the levels of “happiness” that the LUX scientists are expressing.
The point is that whenever scientists do an experiment whose goal is to look for something whose precise details aren’t known, there are two stories running simultaneously:
The scientists are trying to do the best experiment that they can, in order that their search be as thorough and as expansive as it could possibly be with the equipment that they have available.
The scientists are hoping that the thing that they are looking for (or perhaps something else equally or more interesting) will be within reach of their search.
Notice that humans have control over the first story. The wiser they are at designing their experiment, and the more skillful they are in carrying it out, the more effective their search will be. But they have no control over the second story. Whether their prey lies within their reach, or whether it lies far beyond, requiring the technology of the distant future, is up to nature, not humans. In short, story #1 is about skill and talent, but story #2 is about luck. Even a great experiment can’t do the impossible, and even one that doesn’t work quite as well as it was supposed to can be fortunate.
Of course, there is some interplay between the stories. A disaster in story #1 precludes a happy ending in story #2; if the experiment doesn’t work, there won’t be any discoveries! And the better is the outcome in story #1, the more probable is a success in story #2; a more thorough search is more likely to get lucky.
The LUX researchers, in order to make a discovery, have to be lucky in several ways, as I described on Thursday.
Dark matter (at least some of it) has to be made from particles which are heavier than protons and have uniform properties;
These particles have to be rather smoothly distributed through the Milky Way galaxy, rather than bound up in clumps the way ordinary matter is, so that some of them are likely, just by chance, to be passing through the earth;
And they have to interact with ordinary matter at a rate that is not insanely small — no less than a millionth of the interaction rate of high-energy neutrinos with ordinary matter.
None of these things is necessarily true, given what we know about dark matter from our measurements of the heavens. And if any one of them is false, no detector similar to LUX will ever find dark matter; we’ll need other methods, some of which are already under way.
Now, in this context, what’s the worst thing that could happen to a group of scientists who’ve built an experiment? The worst thing that could happen is that after spending several years preparing the experiment, they find it simply doesn’t work. This can happen! These are very difficult experiments requiring very special and remarkable techniques, and every now and then, in the history of such experiments, an unexpected problem arises that can’t be solved without a complete redesign, which is usually too expensive and in any case means years of delay. Or something just explodes and ruins the experiment. Something like this is extremely depressing and often deeply embarrassing.
So if instead the experiment works, the scientists who designed, built and ran it are of course very relieved and reasonably happy. And if, because of a combination of hard work and cleverness, it works better than they expected and as well as they could have hoped, they’re of course enormously pleased, and proud of their work!
Now what could make them happier still — even ecstatic, to the point of staying up late drinking entire bottles of champagne? A discovery, of course. Discovering what they’re looking for, or perhaps something they weren’t even looking for, if it is truly novel and of fundamental importance. If that happens, then they won’t care as much if their experiment worked better than expected… because, if you’re an experimental scientist, there’s nothing, nothing at all, better than discovering something new about nature.
So with this perspective, I think the LUX scientists’ emotions (as conveyed during his talk by Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, the project’s leader) are actually very easy to understand. They are very happy because their experiment works better than they expected and as well as they hoped… maybe even better than that. For this, they get the high respect and admiration of their colleagues. But make no mistake: they’d certainly be a lot happier — overjoyed and humbled — if they’d discovered dark matter. For that, they’d get a place in the history books, major prizes (perhaps a Nobel, if the Nobel Committee could figure out who to give it to), lasting fame, and the almost unimaginable feeling of having uncovered something about nature that no human previously knew, and that (barring a complete collapse of civilization) will never be forgotten. So yes, they’re happy. But not nearly as happy as can be. They’re frustrated, too, just like the rest of us, that nothing’s shown up yet.
However, they’re also hopeful. Since they’ve built such a good experiment, and since they’ve only run it for such a short time so far, they’ll have another very reasonable shot at finding dark matter when they run it for about a full year, in 2014. Not only will they run it longer, they’ll surely also learn, from their experience so far, to be smarter about how they run it. So expect, at the very least, powerful new limits on dark matter from them in eighteen months or so. And maybe, just maybe, something more.
Tomorrow there will be a solar eclipse (i.e., the moon will pass between the earth and the sun, blocking the sun’s light.) Those of us on the east coast of the United States who wake up to a clear sky at dawn will see the rising sun partially eclipsed, as much as half blocked in many places. [Don’t forget that in the US the clocks are changing tonight, so dawn is one hour earlier, as the clock tells it, than it was today; in New York City sunrise is at 6:30 am tomorrow.] Meanwhile, a substantial partial eclipse will be visible across most of Africa, and a less substantial one in parts of southern Europe. And a little sliver of central Africa will be fortunate enough to see one of nature’s most extraordinary spectacles: a total eclipse of the sun, where for a couple of minutes the sky suddenly goes almost dark, the stars come into view, and the pink prominences and silvery corona of the sun glow and shimmer in the darkness of the moon’s shadow.
Really, this ought to have been scheduled for Halloween. Because if you didn’t know to expect a total solar eclipse, and you didn’t know what was going on, there’d be nothing more terrifying.
Remember: Except in the truly dark heart of a total eclipse, looking at the sun for even a few moments can destroy your eyes; either use specially designed “eclipse glasses” (ordinary sunglasses are completely unsafe) or use a pinhole in a piece of cardboard to project the sun’s image onto a piece of paper or a wall. [As I described here, carefully placed binoculars pointed at a piece of paper or wall will work too — but do not look through them!!! just let the sun’s image go through.] For those watching at sunrise, if there is cloud or haze in the east that dims the sunlight, you can look for a few moments — but make it very quick!
