Last week I attended the Eighth Harvard-Smithsonian Conference on Theoretical Astrophysics, entitled “Debates on the Nature of Dark Matter”, which brought together leading figures in astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics. Although there wasn’t much that was particularly new, it was a very useful conference for taking stock of where we are. I thought I’d bring you a few selected highlights that particularly caught my eye.
detectors
LHC Producing 8 TeV Data
Still early days in the 2012 data-taking run, which just started a couple of weeks ago, but already the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] accelerator wizards, operating the machine at 8 TeV of energy per proton-proton collision (compared to last year’s 7 TeV) have brought the collision rates back up nearly to where they were last … Read more
A Neutrino Success Story
Almost all the news on neutrinos in the mainstream press this past few months was about the OPERA experiment, and a possible violation of Einstein’s foundational theory of relativity. That the experiment turned out to be wrong didn’t surprise experts. But one of the concerns that scientists have about how this story turned out and was reported in the press is that perhaps many non-experts may get the impression that science is so full of mistakes that you can’t trust it at all. That would be a very unhappy conclusion — not just unhappy but in fact a very dangerous conclusion, at least for anyone who would like to keep their economy strong, their planet well-treated and their nation well-defended.
So it is important to balance the OPERA mini-fiasco with another hot-off-the-presses neutrino story that illustrates why, even though mistakes in individual scientific experiments are common, collective mistakes in science are rare. A discipline such as physics has intrinsic checks and balances that significantly reduce the probability of errors going unrecognized for long. In the story I’m about to relate, one can recognize how and why scientists start to come to consensus. Though quite suspicious of any individual experiment, scientists generally take a different view of a group of experiments that buttress one another.
The context of this story, though much less revolutionary than a violation of Einstein’s speed limit, still represents a milestone in our understanding of neutrinos, which has been advancing very rapidly over the past fifteen years or so. When I was a starting graduate student in the late 1980s, almost all we knew about neutrinos was that there were at least three types and that they were much lighter than electrons, and perhaps massless. Today we know much, much more about neutrinos and how they behave. And in just the last few months and weeks and days, one of the missing entries in the Encyclopedia Neutrinica appears to have been filled in.
Professor Peskin’s Four Slogans: Advice for the 2012 LHC
On Monday, during the concluding session of the SEARCH Workshop on Large Hadron Collider [LHC] physics (see also here for a second post), and at the start of the panel discussion involving a group of six theorists, Michael Peskin, professor of theoretical particle physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center [and my Ph.D. advisor] opened the … Read more
The Benefits of 8 TeV Collisions Over 7 TeV.
Yesterday, a commenter asked me a very good question that I realized I hadn’t yet addressed on this site. Answering it gives us a chance to look at real data from the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], and to see what differences will arise the machine’s energy is increased from 7 TeV to 8. The protons that … Read more
Exotic Decays of the Higgs: A High Priority for 2012
2012 may well turn out to be The Year of The Higgs. Right now we have very little knowledge about this particle, but that may change dramatically over the year. As I described in my previous post, we’re coming toward the end of Phase 1 of the Higgs search (where the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] search for the simplest possible form of the Higgs particle, the Standard Model Higgs, or SM Higgs for short.) And we’re also starting up Phase 2 of the Higgs search. As discussed in my Cosmic Variance guest post, and in more detail in my most recent post, if a particle resembling the SM Higgs is found, Phase 2 involves checking its details and determining as well as possible whether it is or isn’t precisely what is predicted by the Standard Model. If no such particle is found, Phase 2 involves searching widely for the many other types of Higgs particles that nature might or might not possess. Fortunately, despite these apparently divergent aims, the two possible branches of Phase 2 involve asking some of the same experimental questions (see Figure 3 of the most recent post), and so we can start on Phase 2 before even finishing Phase 1. And that is happening now.
One of the things that has to be done in Phase 2 is to search for decays of the Higgs particle that are not among the decays predicted to occur in the Standard Model. [“Decay” = “a disintegration of one particle into two or more”. Click here for an introduction.] Such “exotic” decays are thought of as particularly plausible, because a lightweight Higgs (below about 150 GeV/c2 or so) is a very sensitive creature. It is very easy for new particles and/or forces to alter the Higgs’ properties, perhaps causing changes in how (or how often) it is produced, and to what (and with what probability) it may decay. As shown in a large number of papers, written by quite a variety of particle physics theorists, there are many, many types of possible exotic decays, and they can arise for many reasons. If you’re curious what kind of exotic decays might occur, I gave a few examples in my now somewhat out-of-date analysis of what the summer’s Higgs searches imply. The basic logic of how unusual Higgs decays might arise is still correct in the cases described, but there are many, many more possibilities too. I’ll have to write a long article about the options in the coming month or so.
New Post on the Higgs Hints
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 … Read more