This week I’m in California, at a conference celebrating two famous professors, from whom I learned an enormous amount when I was a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher. More on this later in the week.
Today, I just want to let you know I have completed the core of my naturalness article, which I began writing a couple of weeks ago. (more…)
ON September 9, 2013
Today (as I sit in a waiting room for jury service) I’ll draw your attention to something that has been quite rare at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]: a notable discrepancy between prediction and data. (Too rare, in fact — when you make so many measurements, some of them should be discrepant; the one place we saw plenty of examples was in the search for and initial study of the Higgs particle.) It’s not big enough to declare as a definite challenge to the Standard Model (the equations we use to describe the known particles and forces), but it’s one we’ll need to be watching… and you can bet there will be dozens of papers trying to suggest possibilities for what this discrepancy, if it is real, might be due to.
The discrepancy has arisen in the search at the CMS experiment for “multileptons”: for proton-proton collisions in which at least three charged leptons — electrons, muons and (to a degree) taus — were produced. Such events are a good place to look for new phenomena: very rare in the Standard Model, but in the context of some speculative ideas (including the possibility of additional types of Higgs particles, or of superpartner particles from supersymmetry, or new light neutral particles that decay sometimes to lepton/anti-lepton pairs, etc.) they can be produced in the decays of some unknown type of particle. (more…)
ON August 28, 2013
Day 3 of the SEARCH workshop (see here for an introduction and overviews of Day 1 and Day 2) opened with my own talk, entitled “On The Frontier: Where New Physics May Be Hiding”. The issue I was addressing is this:
Even though dozens of different strategies have been used by the experimenters at ATLAS and CMS (the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]) to look for various types of new particles, there are still many questions that haven’t been asked and many aspects of the data that haven’t been studied. My goal was to point out a few of these unasked or incompletely asked questions, ones that I think are very important for ATLAS and CMS experts to investigate… both in the existing data and also in the data that the LHC will start producing, with a higher energy per proton-proton collision, in 2015.
I covered four topics — I’ll be a bit long-winded here, so just skip over this part if it bores you.
1. Non-Standard-Model (or “exotic”) Higgs Decays: a lightweight Higgs particle, such as the one we’ve recently discovered, is very sensitive to novel effects, and can reveal them by decaying in unexpected ways. One class of possibilities, studied by a very wide range of theorists over the past decade, is that the Higgs might decay to unknown lightweight particles (possibly related in some way to dark matter). I’ve written about these possible Higgs decays a lot (here, here, here, here, here, here and here). This was a big topic of mine at the last SEARCH workshop, and is related to the issue of data parking/delaying. In recent months, a bunch of young theorists (with some limited help and advice from me) have been working to write an overview article, going systematically through the most promising non-Standard-Model decay modes of the Higgs, and studying how easy or difficult it will be to measure them. Discoveries using the 2011-2012 data are certainly possible! and at least at CMS, the parked data is going to play an important role.
2. What Variants of “Natural” Supersymmetry (And Related Models) Are Still Allowed By ATLAS and CMS Searches? A natural variant of supersymmetry (see my discussion of “naturalness”=genericity here) is one in which the Higgs particle’s mass and the Higgs field’s value (and therefore the W and Z particles’ masses) wouldn’t change drastically if you were somehow to vary the masses of superpartner particles by small amounts. Such variants tend to have the superpartner particle of the Higgs (called the “Higgsino”) relatively light (a few hundred GeV/c² or below), the superpartner of the top (the “top squark”, with which the Higgs interacts very strongly) also relatively light, and the superpartner of the gluino up in the 1-2 TeV range. If the gluino is heavier than 1.4 TeV or so, then it is too heavy to have been produced during the 2011-2012 LHC run; for variants with such a heavy gluino, we may have to wait until 2015 and beyond to discover or rule them out. But it turns out that if the gluino is light enough (generally a bit above 1 TeV/c²) it is possible to make very general arguments, without resort to the three assumptions that go into the most classic searches for supersymmetry, that almost all such natural and currently accessible variants are now ruled out. I say “almost” because there is at least one class of important exceptions where the case is clearly not yet closed, and for which the gluino mass could be well below 1 TeV/c². [Research to completely characterize the situation is still in progress; I’m working on it with Rutgers faculty member David Shih and postdocs Yevgeny Kats and Jared Evans.] What we’ve learned is applicable beyond supersymmetry to certain other classes of speculative ideas.
3. Long-Lived Particles: In most LHC studies, it is assumed that any currently unknown particles that are produced in LHC collisions will decay in microscopic times to particles we know about. But it is also possible that one or more new type of particle will decay only after traveling a measurable distance (about 1 millimeter or greater) from the collision point. Searching for such “long-lived” particles (with lifetimes longer than a trillionth of a second!) is complicated; there are many cases to consider, a non-standard search strategy is almost always required, and sometimes specialized trigger strategies are needed. Until recently, only a few studies had been carried out, many with only 2011 data. A very important advance occurred very recently, however, when CMS produced a study, using the full 2011-2012 data set, looking for a long-lived particle that decays to two jets (or to anything that looks to the detector like two jets, which is a bit more general) after traveling up to a large fraction of a meter. The specialized trigger that was used requires about 300 GeV of energy or more to be produced in the proton-proton collision in the form of jets (or things that look like jets to the triggering system.) This is too much for the search to detect a Higgs particle decaying to one or two long-lived particles, because a Higgs particle’s mass-energy [E=mc2 energy] is only 125 GeV, and it is rather rare therefore for 300 GeV of energy in jets-et-al to be observed when a Higgs is produced. But in many speculative theories with long-lived particles, this amount of energy is easily obtained. As a result, this new CMS search clearly wipes out, at one stroke, many variants of a number of speculative models. It will take theorists a little while to fully understand the impact of this new search, but it will be big. Still, it’s by no means the final word. We need to push harder, improving and broadening the use of these methods, in order that decays of the Higgs itself to long-lived particles can be searched for. This has been done already in a handful of cases (for example if the long-lived particle decays not to jets but to a muon/anti-muon pair or an electron/positron pair, or if the long-lived particle travels several meters before it decays) and in some cases it is already possible to show that at most 1 in 100 to 1000 Higgs particles produce long-lived particles of this type. For some other cases, the triggers developed for the parked data may be crucial.
4. “Soft” Signals: A frontier that has never been explored, but which theorists have been talking about for some years, is one in which a high-energy process associated with a new particle is typically accompanied by an unusually large number of very low-energy particles (typically photons or hadrons with energy below a few GeV). The high-energy process is mimicked by certain common processes that occur in the Standard Model, and consequently the signal is drowned out, like a child’s voice in a crowded room. But the haze of a large number of low-energy particles that accompanies the signal is rare in the mimicking processes, so by keeping only those collisions that show something like this haze, it becomes possible to throw out the mimicking process most of the time, making the signal stand out — as though, in trying to find the child, one could identify a way to get most of the people to leave the room, reducing the noise enough for the child’s voice to be heard. [For experts: The most classic example of this situation arises in certain types of objects called “quirks”, though perhaps there are other examples. For non-experts: I’ll explain what quirks are some other time; it’s a sophisticated story.]
I was pleased that there was lively discussion on all of these four points; that’s essential for a good workshop.
After me there were talks by ATLAS expert Erez Etzion and CMS’s Steve Wurm, surveying a large number of searches for new particles and other phenomena by the two experiments. One new result that particularly caught my eye was a set of CMS searches for new very heavy particles that decay to pairs of W and/or Z particles. The W and Z particles go flying outwards with tremendous energy, and form the kind of jet-like objects I mentioned yesterday in the context of Jesse Thaler’s talk on “jet substructure”. This and a couple of other related measurements are reflective of our moving into a new era, in which detection of jet-like W and Z particles and jet-like top quarks has become part of the standard toolbox of a particle physicist.
The workshop concluded with three hour-long panel discussions:
All in all, a useful workshop — but its true value will depend on how much we all follow up on what we discussed.
ON August 23, 2013
Day 2 of the SEARCH workshop will get a shorter description than it deserves, because I’ve had to spend time finishing my own talk for this morning. But there were a lot of nice talks, so let me at least tell you what they were about.
Both ATLAS and CMS presented their latest results on searches for supersymmetry. (I should remind you that “searches for supersymmetry” are by no means actually limited to supersymmetry — they can be used to discover or exclude many other new particles and forces that have nothing to do with supersymmetry at all.) Speakers Pascal Pralavorio and Sanjay Padhi gave very useful overviews of the dozens of searches that have been done so far as part of this effort, including a few rather new results that are very powerful. (We should see even more appear at next week’s Supersymmetry conference.) My short summary: almost everything easy has been done thoroughly; many challenging searches have also been carried out; if superpartner particles are present, they’re either
Then we had a few talks by theorists. Patrick Meade talked about how unknown particles that are affected by weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces, but not by strong nuclear forces, could give signs that are hiding underneath processes that occur in the Standard Model. (Examples of such particles are the neutralinos and charginos or sleptons of supersymmetry.) To find them requires increased precision in our calculations and in our measurements of processes where pairs of W and/or Z and/or Higgs particles are produced. As a definite example, Meade noted that the rate for producing pairs of W particles disagrees somewhat from current predictions based on the Standard Model, and emphasized that this small disagreement could be due to new particles (such as top squarks, or sleptons, or charginos and neutralinos) although at this point there’s no way to know.
Matt Reece gave an analogous talk about spin-zero quark-like particles that do feel strong nuclear forces, the classic example of which are top squarks. Again, the presence of these particles can be hidden underneath the large signals from production of top quark/anti-quark pairs, or other common processes. ATLAS and CMS have been working hard to look for signals of these types of particles, and have made a lot of progress, but there are still quite a few possible signals that haven’t been searched for yet. Among other things, Reece discussed some methods invented by theorists that might be useful in contributing to this effort. As with the previous talk, the key to a complete search will be improvements in calculations and measurements of top quark production, and of other processes that involve known particles.
After lunch there was a more general discussion about looking for supersymmetry, including conversation about what variants of supersymmetry haven’t yet been excluded by existing ATLAS and CMS searches. (I had a few things to say about that in my talk, but more on that tomorrow.)
Jesse Thaler gave a talk reviewing the enormous progress that has been made in understanding how to distinguish ordinary jets arising from quarks and gluons versus jet-like objects made from a single high-energy W, Z, Higgs or top quark that decays to quarks and anti-quarks. (The jargon is that the trick is to use “jet substructure” — the fact that inside a jet-like W are two sub-jets, each from a quark or anti-quark.) At SEARCH 2012, the experimenters showed very promising though preliminary results using a number of new jet substructure methods that had been invented by (mostly) theorists. By now, the experimenters have shown definitively that these methods work — and will continue to work as the rate of collisions at the LHC grows — and have made a number of novel measurements using them. Learning how to use jet substructure is one of the great success stories of the LHC era, and it will continue to be a major story in coming years.
Two talks by ATLAS (Leandro Nisanti) and CMS (Matt Hearndon) followed, each with a long list of careful measurements of what the Standard Model is doing, mostly based so far only on the 2011 data set (and not yet including last year’s data). These measurements are crucially important for multiple reasons:
Most, but not all, theoretical predictions for these careful measurements have worked well. Those that aren’t working so well are of course being watched and investigated carefully — but there aren’t any discrepancies large enough to get excited about yet (other than the top quark forward-backward asymmetry puzzle, which wasn’t discussed much today). In general, the Standard Model works beautifully — so far.
The day concluded with a panel discussion focused on these Standard Model measurements. Key questions discussed included: how do we use LHC data to understand the structure of the proton more precisely, and how in turn does that affect our searches for unknown phenomena? In particular, a major concern is the risk of circularity; that a phenomenon from an unknown type of particle could produce a subtle effect that we would fail to recognize for what it is, instead misinterpreting it as a small misunderstanding of proton structure, or as a small problem with a theoretical calculation. Such are the challenges of making increasingly precise measurements, and searching for increasingly rare phenomena, in the complicated environment of the LHC.
ON August 22, 2013
The first day of the SEARCH workshop was focused on current and future measurements of the new Higgs particle discovered in 2012. A lot of the issues I’ve written about before (for instance here and here) and most of the updates were rather technical, so I won’t cover them today. But I thought it useful to take a look at what was said by Raman Sundrum and separately by Nima Arkani-Hamed, whom you’ve heard about many times (for instance, here and here), on the subject of the hierarchy problem and “naturalness”.
First, let me remind you of the issue. The hierarchy problem can be phrased in many ways. Here’s one. Here’s another: for a Standard Model Higgs (the simplest possible type of Higgs particle) to show up, without any other new particles or forces at the Large Hadron Collider, is … well, let’s say it’s completely shocking, with a caveat. Why?
This fact — that spin-zero particles like the Higgs are accompanied by other particles and forces at a similar energy range — isn’t a mystery. Particle physicists (and others who use quantum field theory, the type of math used in the Standard Model) understand why this should be true, and have for several decades. The jargon is that it is “natural” (not meaning “from nature”, but rather meaning “generically true”) for spin-zero particles to have other particles and forces around at comparable energy scales. (I’ll explain the argument another time.)
So to discover the Higgs particle at a mass-energy of 125 GeV, and no other new particles or phenomena below, say, 1000-2000 GeV or so, would fly in the face of what we’ve seen again and again in physics, both in past data and in calculations within speculative theories. In this sense, finding nothing except a Standard Model Higgs at the LHC would be shocking. (I say “would be” rather than “is” because the LHC is still young, and no overarching conclusions can yet be drawn from its current data.)
But — here’s the caveat — how bad is this shock? After all, somewhat surprising things do happen in nature all the time. Only astonishingly, spectacularly surprising things are very rare. Yes, it would be a very big shock if new particles and forces associated with the Higgs have a mass-energy a trillion trillion times higher than that of the Higgs. But what if they’re just a few times higher than would be natural, let’s say at 10,000 GeV — which would be out of reach of the LHC? Maybe that is a small enough shock that we shouldn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately, this is a judgment call; there’s no sharp answer to this question.
As Sundrum put it, there are (crudely) three logically distinct possibilities for what lies ahead:
Arkani-Hamed made a similar distinction, but addressed the third case in more detail, breaking it up into two sub-cases.
All of this seems completely contradictory with what we observe in our world. But! One of the important conceptual lessons from string theory [this is yet another example of something important that would not have been learned if people hadn’t actually been studying string theory] is that when forces become very strong, making the physics extremely complicated to describe, it is possible that a better description of that world becomes available — and that in some special cases, this better description has one additional dimension of space and weaker forces. In short, Witten’s idea is that our way of understanding our world, with three spatial dimensions, no apparent superymmetry and no extremely strong forces, might actually be simply an alternative and simpler description of a supersymmetric world with only two spatial dimensions with an extremely strong force. Arkani-Hamed, trying to apply this to the hierarchy problem, noticed this idea makes a prediction, but he showed that the prediction is false in the Standard Model, and it seems impossible to add any collection of particles that would make it true.
ON August 21, 2013
Greetings from Stony Brook’s Simon’s Center, and the SEARCH 2013 workshop. (I reported on the SEARCH 2012 workshop here, here, here and here.) Over the next three days, a small group (about 50) of theoretical particle physicists and experimentalists from ATLAS and CMS (two of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]) will be discussing the latest results from the LHC, and brainstorming about what else should be done with the existing LHC data and with future data.
The workshop was organized by three theorists, Raman Sundrum, professor at Maryland (who has opened the day with a characteristically brilliant and inspirational talk about the status of the field and the purpose of the workshop), Patrick Meade, professor at Stony Brook, and Michele Papucci, soon-to-be professor at Michigan.
Of course we’ll be discussing the newly discovered Higgs particle — that discussion will occupy most of today — but we’ll be also looking at many other types of particles, forces and other phenomena that nature might be hiding from us, and how we would be able to uncover them if they exist. There’ve been many dozens of searches done at both ATLAS and CMS, but the experimentalists certainly haven’t had time to try everything plausible — and theorists haven’t yet thought of everything they might try. Workshops like this are aimed at making sure no stones are left unturned in the existing huge pile of data from 2011-2012, and also that we’re fully prepared to deal with the new data, from higher-energy proton-proton collisions, that will start pouring in starting in 2015.
ON August 20, 2013
Did you know that another name for Minneapolis, Minnesota is “Snowmass”? Just ask a large number of my colleagues, who are in the midst of a once-every-few-years exercise aimed at figuring out what should be the direction of the U.S. particle physics program. I quote:
They are doing so in perhaps the worst of times, when political attacks on science are growing, government cuts to science research are severe, budgets to fund the research programs of particle physicists like me have been chopped by jaw-dropping amounts (think 25% or worse, from last year’s budget to this year’s — you can thank the sequester).. and all this at a moment when the data from the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments are not yet able to point us in an obvious direction for our future research program. Intelligent particle physicists disagree on what to do next, there’s no easy way to come to consensus, and in any case Congress is likely to ignore anything we suggest. But at least I hear Minneapolis is lovely in July and August! This is the first Snowmass workshop that I have missed in a very long time, especially embarrassing since my Ph.D. thesis advisor is one of the conveners. What can I say? I wish my colleagues well…!
Meanwhile, I’d like to comment briefly on a few particle physics stories that you’ve perhaps seen in the press over recent days. I’ll cover one of them today — a measurement of a rare process which has now been officially “discovered”, though evidence for it was quite strong already last fall — and address a couple of others later in the week. After that I’ll tell you about a couple of other stories that haven’t made the popular press… (more…)
ON July 31, 2013
My rather hasty, breathless and inconsistent summaries (#1, #2 and #3) of last week’s talks at the excellent Higgs Symposium (held at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics) clearly had their limitations. So I thought it might be useful to give a more organized overview, with more careful language appropriate for non-expert readers, of our current knowledge and ignorance concerning the recently discovered Higgs-like particle (which most of us do believe is a Higgs particle of some type, though not necessarily of the simplest, “Standard Model” type.)
I’m therefore writing an article that tries to put the questions about the Higgs-like particle into a sensible order, and then draws upon the talks that were given at the Symposium to provide the current best answers. About half of the article is done, and you’re welcome to read it. Due to other commitments, I won’t probably get back to finish it until next week. But “Part 1” is long enough that it will take some time for most readers to absorb anyway…
ON January 17, 2013
By almost all measures, the Higgs Symposium at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, was a great success. The only negative was that Professor Peter Higgs himself had a bad cold this week, and had to cancel his talk, as well as missing the majority of the talks by others. Obviously all of us in attendance were very disappointed not to hear directly from him, and we wish him a speedy recovery.
Other than this big hole in the schedule, the talks given at the symposium seemed to me to form a coherent summary of where we are right now in our understanding of the Higgs field and particle. They were full of interesting material, and wonderfully complementary to one another. This motivates me to try to provide, for non-experts, some future articles on what the conference attendees had to say. But to write such articles well takes time. So for now, here’s the quick version summarizing the last few talks, along the lines of the summaries I wrote (here and here) of the earlier talks. The slides from all the talks are posted here.
Here we go: (more…)
ON January 14, 2013
The December solstice has come and gone at 11:11 a.m. London time (6:11 a.m New York time). That’s the moment when the north pole of the Earth points most away from the sun, and the south pole points most toward it. Because it’s followed by a weekend and then Christmas Eve, it marks the end of the 2012 blogging season, barring a major event between now and year’s end. But although 11:11 London time is the only moment of astronomical significance during this day (clearly the universe does not care where humans set our international date line and exactly how we set our time zones, so destruction was never going to be at local midnight — something the media doesn’t seem to get) it obviously wasn’t the end of the world.
A lot of people do put a lot of stock in prophecy, including prophecies of the end of the world that nobody ever made (such as the one not made for today by the Mayans, through their calendar) and others that people made but were wrong (such as those made by Harold Camping last year and by many throughout history who preceded him.) If anyone were any good at prophecy they’d be able to use their special knowledge to become billionaires, so maybe we should be watching Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg and the Koch brothers and people like that. I haven’t heard any rumors of them building bunkers or spaceships yet. Of course at the end of the year they may get a small tax hike, but that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The Large Hadron Collider [LHC], meanwhile, has triumphantly reached the end of its first run of proton-proton collisions. Goal #1 of the LHC was to allow physicists at the ATLAS and CMS experiments to discover the Higgs particle, or particles, or whatever took their place in nature; and it would appear that, in a smashing success, they have co-discovered one. But no Higgs particles, or anything like them, will be produced again until 2015. Although the LHC will run for a short while in early 2013, it will do so in a different mode, smashing not protons but the nuclei of lead atoms together, in order to study the properties of extremely hot and dense matter, under conditions the universe hasn’t seen since the earliest stages of the Big Bang that launched the current era of our universe. Then it will be closed down for repairs and upgrades. So until 2015, any additional information we’re going to learn about the Higgs particle, or any other unknown particle that might have been produced at the LHC, is going to be obtained by analyzing the data that has been collected in 2011 and 2012. The total amount of data is huge; what was collected in 2012 was about 4.5 times as much as in 2011, and it was taken at 8 TeV of energy per proton-proton collision rather than 7 TeV as in 2011. I can assure you there will be many new things learned from analyzing that data throughout 2013 and 2014.
Of course a lot of people prophesied confidently that we’d discover supersymmetry, or something else dramatic, very early on at the LHC. Boy, were they wrong! Those of us who were cautioning against such optimistic statements are not sure whether to laugh or cry, because of course it would have been great to have such a discovery early in the LHC program. But there was ample reason to believe (despite what other bloggers sometimes say) that even if supersymmetry exists and is accessible to the LHC experiments, discovering it could take a lot longer than just two years! For instance, see this paper written in 2006 pointing out that the search strategies being planned for seeking supersymmetry might fail in the presence of a few extra lightweight particles not predicted in the minimal variants of supersymmetry. As far as I can tell at present, this very big loophole has only partly been closed by the LHC studies done up to now. The same loophole applies for other speculative ideas, including certain variants of LHC-accessible extra dimensions. I am hopeful that these loopholes can be closed in 2013 and 2014, with additional analysis on the current data, but until they are, you should be very cautious believing those who claim that reasonable variants of LHC-accessible supersymmetry (meaning “natural variants of supersymmetry that resolve the hierarchy problem”) are ruled out by the LHC experiments. It’s just not true. Not yet. The only classes of theories that have been almost thoroughly ruled out by LHC data are those predict on general grounds that there should be no observable Higgs particle at all (e.g. classic technicolor).
While we’re on the subject, I’ve been looking back at how I did on prophecy this year. It’s been a remarkably good year, probably my best ever — though admittedly I only made very easy (though not necessarily common) predictions. First, the really easy one: I assured you, as did most of my colleagues, that 2012 would be the Year of the Higgs — at least, the Year of the Simplest Possible Higgs particle, called the “Standard Model Higgs”. It would be the year when Phase 1 of the Higgs Search would end — when we’d either find a Higgs particle of Standard Model type (or something looking vaguely like it), or, if not, we’d know we’d have to move to a more aggressive search in Phase 2, in which we’d look for more complicated versions of the Higgs particle that would have been much harder to find. We started the year with ambiguous hints of the Higgs particle, too flimsy to be sure of, but certainly tantalizing, at around a mass of 125 GeV/c2. In July the hints turned into a discovery — somewhat faster than expected for a Standard Model Higgs particle, because the rate for this particle to appear in collisions that produce two photons was higher than anticipated. The excess in the photon signal means either the probability for the Higgs particle to decay to photons is larger than predicted for a Higgs of Standard Model type, or both CMS and ATLAS experienced a fortunate statistical fluctuation that made the discovery easier. We still don’t know which it was; though we’ll know more by March, this ambiguity may remain with us until 2015.
One prophecy I made all the way back at the beginning of this blog, July 2011, was that the earliest search strategy for the Higgs, through its decays to a lepton, anti-lepton, neutrino and anti-neutrino, wouldn’t end up being crucial in the discovery; it was just too difficult. (In this experimental context, “lepton” refers only to “electron” or “muon”; taus don’t count, for technical reasons.) In the end, I said, it would be decays of the Higgs to two photons and to two lepton/anti-lepton pairs that would be the critical ones, because they would provide a clean signal that would be uncontroversial. And that prophesy was correct; the photon-based and lepton-based searches were the signals that led to discovery.
Now we’ve reached December, and the data seems to imply that except possibly for this overabundance of photons, which still tantalizes us, the various measurements of how the Higgs-like particle is produced and decays are starting to agree, to a precision which is still only moderate, with the predictions of the Standard Model for a Higgs of this mass. Fewer and fewer experts are still suggesting that this is not a Higgs particle. But it will be some years yet — 2018 or later — before measurements are precise enough to start convincing people that this Higgs particle is really of Standard Model type. Many variants of the Standard Model, with new particles and forces, predict that the difference of the real Higgs from a Standard Model Higgs may be subtle, with deviations at the ten percent level or even less. Meanwhile, other Higgs-like particles, with different masses and different properties, might be hiding in the data, and it may take quite a while to track them down. Many years of data collecting and data analysis lie ahead, in Phase 2 of the Higgs search.
Another prophecy I made at the beginning of the year was that Exotic Decays of the Higgs would be a high priority for 2012. You might think this prophesy was wrong, because in fact, so far, there have been very few searches at ATLAS, CMS and LHCb for such decays. But the challenge that required prioritizing these decays wasn’t data analysis; it was the problem of even collecting the data. The problem is that many exotic decays of the Higgs would lead to events that might not be selected by the all-important trigger system that determines which tiny fraction of the LHC’s collisions to store permanently for analysis! At the beginning of 2012 there was a risk that some of these processes would have been dumped by the trigger and irretrievably lost from the 2012 data, making future searches for such decays impossible or greatly degraded. At a hadron collider like the LHC, you have to think ahead! If you don’t consider carefully the analyses you’ll want to do a year or two from now, you may not set the trigger properly today. So although the priority for data analysis in 2012 was to find the Higgs particle and measure its bread-and-butter properties, the fact that the Higgs has come out looking more or less Standard Model-like in 2012 means that focusing on exotic possibilities, including exotic decays, will be one of the obvious places to look for something new, and thus a very high priority for data analysis, in 2013 and 2014. And that’s why, for the trigger — for the collection of the data — exotic decays were a very high priority for 2012. Indeed, one significant use of the new strategy of delayed data streaming at ATLAS and of data parking at CMS (two names for the same thing) was to address this priority. [My participation in this effort, working with experimentalists and with several young theorists, was my most rewarding project of 2012.] As I explained to you, a Higgs particle with a low mass, such as 125 GeV/c2, is very sensitive to the presence of new particles and forces that are otherwise very difficult to detect, and it easily could exhibit one or more types of exotic decays. So there will be a lot of effort put into looking for signs of exotic decays in 2013 and 2014! I’m very excited about all the work that lies ahead of us.
Now, the prophecy I’d like to make, but cannot — because I do not have any special insight into the answer — is on the question of whether the LHC will make great new discoveries in the future, or whether the LHC has already made its last discovery: a Higgs particle of Standard Model type. Even if the latter is the case, we will need years of data from the LHC in order to distinguish these two possibilities; there’s no way for us to guess. It’s clear that Nature’s holding secrets from us. We know the Standard Model (the equations we use to describe all the known particles and forces) is not a complete theory of nature, because it doesn’t explain things like dark matter (hey, were dark matter particles perhaps discovered in 2012?), and it doesn’t tell us why, for example, there are six types of quarks, or why the heaviest quark has a mass that is more than 10,000 times larger than the mass of the lightest quarks, etc. What we don’t know is whether the answers to those secrets are accessible to the LHC; does it have enough energy per collision, and enough collisions, for the job? The only way to find out is to run the LHC, and to dig thoroughly through its data for any sign of anything amiss with the predictions of the Standard Model. This is very hard work, and it will take the rest of the decade (but not until the end of the world.)
In the meantime, please do not fret about the quiet in the tunnel outside Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will be back, bigger and better (well, at least with more energy per collision) in 2015. And while we wait during the two year shutdown, the experimentalists at ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb will be hard at work, producing many new results from the 2011 and 2012 proton collision data! Even the experiments CDF and DZero from the terminated Tevatron are still writing new papers. In short, fear not: not only isn’t the December solstice of 2012 the end of the world, it doesn’t even signal a temporary stop to the news about the Higgs particle!
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One last personal note (just for those with some interest in my future.)
ON December 21, 2012
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