Category Archives: Higgs

Exciting Day Ahead at LHC

Posted on December 15, 2015 | 4 comments

At CERN, the laboratory that hosts the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. Four years ago, almost to the day. Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, delivered the first talk in a presentation on 2011 LHC data. Speaking to the assembled scientists and dignitaries, she presented the message that energized the physics community: a little bump had shown up on a plot. Continue reading →

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Posted in Higgs, LHC News, Particle Physics

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LHC Starts Collisions; and a Radio Interview Tonight

Posted on May 6, 2015 | 42 comments

In the long and careful process of restarting the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] after its two-year nap for upgrades and repairs, another milestone has been reached: protons have once again collided inside the LHC’s experimental detectors (named ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE). This is good news, but don’t get excited yet. It’s just one small step. These are collisions at the lowest energy at which the LHC operates (450 GeV per proton, to be compared with the 4000 GeV per proton in 2012 and the 6500 GeV per proton they’ve already achieved in the last month, though in non-colliding beams.) Also the number of protons in the beams, and the number of collisions per second, is still very, very small compared to what will be needed. So discoveries are not imminent!  Yesterday’s milestone was just one of the many little tests that are made to assure that the LHC is properly set up and ready for the first full-energy collisions, which should start in about a month.

But since full-energy collisions are on the horizon, why not listen to a radio show about what the LHC will be doing after its restart is complete? Today (Wednesday May 6th), Virtually Speaking Science, on which I have appeared a couple of times before, will run a program at 5 pm Pacific time (8 pm Eastern). Science writer Alan Boyle will be interviewing me about the LHC’s plans for the next few months and the coming years. You can listen live, or listen later once they post it.  Here’s the link for the program.

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Posted in Dark Matter, Higgs, LHC Background Info, LHC News, Public Outreach

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Giving Public Talk Jan. 20th in Cambridge, MA

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 34 comments

Hope all of you had a good holiday and a good start to the New Year!

I myself continue to be extraordinarily busy as we move into 2015, but I am glad to say that some of that activity involves communicating science to the public.  In fact, a week from today I will be giving a public talk — really a short talk and a longer question/answer period — in Cambridge, just outside of Boston and not far from MIT. This event is a part of the monthly “CafeSci” series, which is affiliated with the famous NOVA science television programs produced for decades by public TV/Radio station WGBH in Boston.

Note for those of you have gone before to CafeSci events: it will be in a new venue, not far from Kendall Square. Here’s the announcement:

Tuesday, January 20th at 7pm (about 1 hour long)
Le Laboratoire Cambridge (NEW LOCATION)
http://www.lelaboratoirecambridge.com/
650 East Kendall St, Cambridge, MA

“The Large Hadron Collider Restarts Soon! What Lies Ahead?”

Speaker: Matthew Strassler

“After a long nap, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], where the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012, will begin operating again in 2015, with more powerful collisions than before. Now that we know Higgs particles exist, what do we want to know about them? What methods can we use to answer our questions? And what is the most important puzzle that we are hoping the LHC will help us solve?”

Public Transit: Red line to Kendall Square, walk straight down 3rd Street, turn right onto Athenaeum Street, and left onto East Kendall

Parking: There is a parking deck – the 650 East Kendall Street Garage – accessible by Linskey Way.

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Posted in Higgs, LHC News, Public Outreach

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How a Trigger Can Potentially Make or Break an LHC Discovery

Posted on December 4, 2014 | 70 comments

Triggering is an essential part of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]; there are so many collisions happening each second at the LHC, compared to the number that the experiments can afford to store for later study, that the data about most of the collisions (99.999%) have to be thrown away immediately, completely and permanently within a second after the collisions occur.  The automated filter, partly hardware and partly software, that is programmed to make the decision as to what to keep and what to discard is called “the trigger”.  This all sounds crazy, but it’s necessary, and it works.   Usually.

Let me give you one very simple example of how things can go wrong, and how the ATLAS and CMS experiments [the two general purpose experiments at the LHC] attempted to address the problem.  Before you read this, you may want to read my last post, which gives an overview of what I’ll be talking about in this one.

Click here to read the rest of the article…

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Posted in Higgs, LHC Background Info, Particle Physics

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Final Days of Busy Visit to CERN

Posted on December 2, 2014 | 58 comments

I’m a few days behind (thanks to an NSF grant proposal that had to be finished last week) but I wanted to write a bit more about my visit to CERN, which concluded Nov. 21st in a whirlwind of activity. I was working full tilt on timely issues related to Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], currently scheduled to start early next May.   (You may recall the LHC has been shut down for repairs and upgrades since the end of 2012.)

A certain fraction of my time for the last decade has been taken up by concerns about the LHC experiments’ ability to observe new long-lived particles, specifically ones that aren’t affected by the electromagnetic or strong nuclear forces. (Long-lived particles that are affected by those forces are easier to search for, and are much more constrained by the LHC experiments.  More about them some other time.)

This subject is important to me because it is a classic example of how the trigger systems at LHC experiments could fail us — whereby a spectacular signal of a new phenomena could be discarded and lost in the very process of taking and storing the data! If no one thinks carefully about the challenges of finding long-lived particles in advance of running the LHC, we can end up losing a huge opportunity, unnecessarily. Fortunately some of us are thinking about it, but we are small in number. It is an uphill battle for those experimenters within ATLAS and CMS [the two general purpose experiments at the LHC] who are working hard to make sure they have the required triggers available. I can’t tell you how many times people within the experiments — even at the Naturalness conference I wrote about recently — have told me “such efforts are hopeless”… despite the fact that their own experiments have actually shown, already in public and in some cases published measurements (including this, this, this, this, this, and this), that it is not. Conversely, many completely practical searches for long-lived particles have not been carried out, often because there was no trigger strategy able to capture them, or because, despite the events having been recorded, no one at ATLAS or CMS has had time or energy to actually search through their data for this signal.

Now what is meant by “long-lived particles”? Continue reading →

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Posted in Higgs, Particle Physics, The Scientific Process

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Day 2 At CERN

Posted on November 12, 2014 | 7 comments

Day 2 of my visit to CERN (host laboratory of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]) was a pretty typical CERN day for me. Here’s a rough sketch of how it panned out:

  • 1000: after a few chores, arrived at CERN by tram. Worked on my ongoing research project #1. Answered an email about my ongoing research project #2.
  • 1100: attended a one hour talk, much of it historical, by Chris Quigg, one of the famous experts on “quarkonium” (atom-like objects made from a quark or anti-quark, generally referring specifically to charm and bottom quarks). Charmonium (charm quark/antiquark atoms) was discovered 40 years ago this week, in two very different experiments.
  • 1200: Started work on the talk that I am giving on the afternoon of Day 3 to some experimentalists who work at ATLAS. [ATLAS and CMS are the two general-purpose experimental detectors at the LHC; they were used to discover the Higgs particle.] It involves some new insights concerning the search for long-lived particles (hypothesized types of new particles that would typically decay only after having traveled a distance of at least a millimeter, and possibly a meter or more, before they decay to other particles.)
  • 1230: Working lunch with an experimentalist from ATLAS and another theorist, mainly discussing triggering, and other related issues, concerning long-lived particles. Learned a lot about the new opportunities that ATLAS will have starting in 2015.
  • 1400: In an extended discussion with two other theorists, got a partial answer to a subtle question that arose in my research project #2.
  • 1415: Sent an email to my collaborators on research project #2.
  • 1430: Back to work on my talk for Day 3. Reading some relevant papers, drawing some illustrations, etc.
  • 1600: Two-hour conversation over coffee with an experimentalist from CMS, yet again about triggering, regarding long-lived particles, exotic decays of the Higgs particle, and both at once. Learned a lot of important things about CMS’s plans for the near-term and medium-term future, as well as some of the subtle issues with collecting and analyzing data that are likely to arise in 2015, when the LHC begins running again.

[Why triggering, triggering, triggering? Because if you don’t collect the data in the first place, you can’t analyze it later!  We have to be working on triggering in 2014-2015 before the LHC takes data again in 2015-2018]

  • 1800: An hour to work on the talk again.
  • 1915: Skype conversation with two of my collaborators in research project #1, about a difficult challenge which had been troubling me for over a week. Subtle theoretical issues and heavy duty discussion, but worth it in the end; most of the issues look like they may be resolvable.
  • 2100: Noticed the time and that I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. Went to the CERN cafeteria and ate dinner while answering emails.
  • 2130: More work on the talk for Day 3.
  • 2230: Left CERN. Wrote blog post on the tram to the hotel.
  • 2300: Went back to work in my hotel room.

Day 1 was similarly busy and informative, but had the added feature that I hadn’t slept since the previous day. (I never seem to sleep on overnight flights.) Day 3 is likely to be as busy as Day 2. I’ll be leaving Geneva before dawn on Day 4, heading to a conference.

It’s a hectic schedule, but I’m learning many things!  And if I can help make these huge and crucial experiments more powerful, and give my colleagues a greater chance of a discovery and a reduced chance of missing one, it will all be worth it.

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Posted in Higgs, LHC Background Info, Particle Physics

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Off to CERN

Posted on November 10, 2014 | 38 comments

After a couple of months of hard work on grant writing, career plans and scientific research, I’ve made it back to my blogging keyboard.  I’m on my way to Switzerland for a couple of weeks in Europe, spending much of the time at the CERN laboratory. CERN, of course, is the host of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], where the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. I’ll be consulting with my experimentalist and theorist colleagues there… I have many questions for them. And I hope they’ll have many questions for me too, both ones I can answer and others that will force me to go off and think for a while.

You may recall that the LHC was turned off (as planned) in early 2013 for repairs and an upgrade. Run 2 of the LHC will start next year, with protons colliding at an energy of around 13 TeV per collision. This is larger than in Run 1, which saw 7 TeV per collision in 2011 and 8 TeV in 2012.  This increases the probability that a proton-proton collision will make a Higgs particle, which has a mass of 125 GeV/c², by about a factor of 2 ½.  (Don’t try to figure that out in your head; the calculation requires detailed knowledge of what’s inside a proton.) The number of proton-proton collisions per second will also be larger in Run 2 than in Run 1, though not immediately. In fact I would not be surprised if 2015 is mostly spent addressing unexpected challenges. But Run 1 was a classic: a small pilot run in 2010 led to rapid advances in 2011 and performance beyond expectations in 2012. It’s quite common for these machines to underperform at first, because of unforeseen issues, and outperform in the long run, as those issues are solved and human ingenuity has time to play a role. All of which is merely to say that I would view any really useful results in 2015 as a bonus; my focus is on 2016-2018.

Isn’t it a bit early to be thinking about 2016? No, now is the time to be thinking about 2016 triggering challenges for certain types of difficult-to-observe phenomena. These include exotic, unexpected decays of the Higgs particle, or other hard-to-observe types of Higgs particles that might exist and be lurking in the LHC’s data, or rare decays of the W and Z particle, and more generally, anything that involves a particle whose (rest) mass is in the 100 GeV/c² range, and whose mass-energy is therefore less than a percent of the overall proton-proton collision energy. The higher the collision energy grows, the harder it becomes to study relatively low-energy processes, even though we make more of them. To be able to examine them thoroughly and potentially discover something out of place — something that could reveal a secret worth even more than the Higgs particle itself — we have to become more and more clever, open-minded and vigilant.

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Posted in Higgs, LHC News, Particle Physics

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Will the Higgs Boson Destroy the Universe???

Posted on September 10, 2014 | 121 comments

No.

The Higgs boson is not dangerous and will not destroy the universe.

The Higgs boson is a type of particle, a little ripple in the Higgs field. [See here for the Higgs FAQ.] This lowly particle, if you’re lucky enough to make one (and at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, only one in a trillion proton-proton collisions actually does so) has a brief life, disintegrating to other particles in less than the time that it takes light to cross from one side of an atom to another. (Recall that light can travel from the Earth to the Moon in under two seconds.) Such a fragile creature is hardly more dangerous than a mayfly.

Anyone who says otherwise probably read Hawking’s book (or read about it in the press) but didn’t understand what he or she was reading, perhaps because he or she had not read the Higgs FAQ.

If you want to worry about something Higgs-related, you can try to worry about the Higgs field, which is “ON” in our universe, though not nearly as “on” as it could be. If someone were to turn the Higgs field OFF, let’s say as a practical joke, that would be a disaster: all ordinary matter across the universe would explode, because the electrons on the outskirts of atoms would lose their mass and fly off into space. This is not something to worry about, however. We know it would require an input of energy and can’t happen spontaneously.  Moreover, the amount of energy required to artificially turn the Higgs field off is immense; to do so even in a small room would require energy comparable to that of a typical supernova, an explosion of a star that can outshine an entire galaxy and releases the vast majority of its energy in unseen neutrinos. No one, fortunately, has a supernova in his or her back pocket. And if someone did, we’d have more immediate problems than worrying about someone wasting a supernova trying to turn off the Higgs field in a basement somewhere.

Now it would also be a disaster if someone could turn the Higgs field WAY UP… more than when your older brother turned up the volume on your stereo or MP3 player and blew out your speakers. In this case atoms would violently collapse, or worse, and things would be just as nasty as if the Higgs field were turned OFF. Should you worry about this? Well, it’s possible this could happen spontaneously, so it’s slightly more plausible. But I do mean slightly. Very slightly. Continue reading →

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Posted in Higgs, Science and Modern Society

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