Bigger than Higgs? Boffins see hints of bulbous new Boson The Higgs Boson will remain a big deal for plugging gaps in the unified theory, but may not be the biggest Boson in the universe. That's the tantalising prospect raised by analysis of experiments conducted in June 2015 at the recently-upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The experiments were conducted by the ATLAS Project, …
The Higgs boson was something expected. Its nonexistence would be much greater news thaan its discovery.
However this new boson, if real, is something outside the Standard Model. Which means it's new physics!
I wonder if they discovered the lightest supersymmetry particle. Or the WIMP, the particle of the elusive dark matter. Hopefully both at the same time. This would be something worth more than one Nobel prize!
I disagree. Finding this has required nothing more than engineering. You build the accelerator. They come. Explaining it might be worth a prize, depending on what it is, but probably only one and perhaps not even that if it turns out that the necessary theory was laid down by someone who is now dead. On which subject ... I think you meant "something new in particle physics" because the rest of physics has been getting along just fine for the past half century, thanks.
Having said all that, I share your excitement that something might be about to happen and I'm glad that I'm not a particles theoretician right now -- it must be quite nerve-wracking knowing that your entire life's work might be about to be consigned to the bin marked "interesting, but wrong".
No, not in the least like Newton's laws. Those have a well-defined domain within which they are a reasonable approximation that is easier to work with than SR or GR or QM. The things that the {super}-{string|gravity|symmetry} people have played with for the last 50 years are less easy to work with and so are only worthwhile if they explain stuff that the standard model does not.
Each time we get a discovery that rules out (say) supersymmetry variants, the corresponding body of work into that variant might as well not have been done and in a century's time may only be known to one or two people working in a history department.
Probably not. Most likely a spurious reading. This is very, very tentative. Don't expect too much - which is to say, don't expect anything. You remember this, right?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
See http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8174:
"...the 2 GeV Run 1 excesses have gone away. There is a diphoton excess at 766 GeV, but an unimpressive one (2.6 sigma locally, 1.2 sigma with look elsewhere effect). [...] Bottom line: nothing beyond the SM so far."
Oh, the faster than light neutrinos seemed crap to me from the first time I heard about them. I believed they overcompensated the relativity corrections of the GPS signal (counted them twice) but the truth was even more mundane.
However 2.6 sigmas in one sensor and over 3 sigmas in the other, is something. Not enough to announce a new particle (you need 5 for that) but it is still 99% chance it is not a fluke (unless you have a systematic error like the neutrino experiment).
Time (again) for one of my favourite quotes, from Isaac Asimov:
"The most exciting phrase to hear in physics, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
ADDENDUM: Bugger, just read further down the comments and noticed that Joseph Eoff beat me to it... :-/
"This would be something worth more than one Nobel prize!"
Who would or should get a Nobel Prize for this, if it turns out to be a discovery instead of a false alarm? (And of course I need not remind you that the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to up to 3 living individuals, and can not be given to organizations.)
I don't see how anyone could claim to deserve a Nobel for what would be a completely unexpected and unpredicted discovery.
Whether a Nobel is deserved, and who deserves it, depends on what is found. If it was a supersymmetric partner, within a mass range predicted by theory, then eventually if the theory is confirmed the originators of that theory may deserve one. If it is something completely unexpected that causes everyone's theories to be reworked, then the maybe whoever comes up with a theory that explains it that is confirmed decades from now by the LHC's successor would deserve one.
"'the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to up to 3 living individuals, and can not be given to organizations.' Bullshit!"
Oh, the Peace Prize. Who fukken cares? *I* certainly don't.
At any rate, the matter was broached specifically in regard to the Nobel Prize for Physics, about which my statement is true. So your observation, while correct for the "Peace Prize" (and only for the "Peace Prize", I believe), is kinda tangential to the subject under discussion. Also it suffers from the same defect as my original statement: it is not sufficiently specific: it is wrong in regards to the actual science prizes and (probably) about the Literature and Economics prizes.
So, all in all, basically a worthwhile correction but one which in its own turn required a li'l bit of correcting.
Turtle, I must apologise. I have been a very bad Git and far too churlish. You are of course correct. The only thing I can say in mitigation is that I had just been watching an English TV show wherein it was claimed that turkey was a traditional Christmas dinner in Georgian times! Worse, every ten minutes, there was a five minute summary of what had been presented so far! God I hate Christmas...
"Worse, every ten minutes, there was a five minute summary of what had been presented so far! "
God a hate that.
Seems that US Doco's seem to do that a lot, constantly repeat and summarize what was shown 5 minutes ago. It's especially irritating when you download and watch a doco ad free. OMG the repetition.... Seems a 42 minute runtime doco has 20 minutes of information, and 22 minutes of repetition of that information.
"I speak of none but the collider that is to come after me. A collider whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate— and yet I will design it for you. A collider which can discover the boson to form the Ultimate Standard Model, a collider of such infinite and subtle complexity that massive EU funding itself will form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new T-shirts and go down into the collider to navigate its ten decade programme. Yes, I shall design this collider for you, and I shall name it for you. And it shall be called …………. the Extremely Large Hadron Collider."
The next one will not do hadron-boom-boom though:
Commentary: Super and Great Colliders
Reasons to be excited: naively combining CMS and ATLAS gives something of 4 sigma significance, people are making the analogy with the early Higgs signal. Reasons to be less excited: in the case of the early Higgs signal, the tentative signal was what was expected from the Higgs, and we had very good reasons to believe there was a Higgs roughly in that mass range. Here I know of no well-motivated models that predict this: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is not that.
Commentary from Matt Strassler.
Best explanation and discussion of the implications of the diphoton excess is from Jester
And also, no SUSY:
Whatever you thought the remaining probability was for SUSY after the negative Run 1 results, it’s significantly smaller today.
Sorry, TeeCee, but it's not a graviton. A 500GeV boson would have very short range. The graviton has a predicted rest mass of zero, and a spin of 2, but it couples very weakly which is why gravity is such a weak force.
A good way to demonstrate how weak gravity is is to jump out of a building. An entire planet's worth of graviton-emitting particles will speed you up in a few seconds, but the electromagnetic forces in a tiny bit of pavement will stop you like *that* [clicks fingers].
I read somewhere that its not really the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons around molecules and atoms that prevents you from passing through the pavement. Its the quantum thing about the electrons not being able to occupy the same energy state (sorry, brain did not retain what that is called).
I read somewhere that its not really the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons around molecules and atoms that prevents you from passing through the pavement. Its the quantum thing about the electrons not being able to occupy the same energy state (sorry, brain did not retain what that is called).
My understanding is that it's a combination of electrostatic force and the Pauli exclusion principle - or, more precisely, the Pauli principle is one formulation of a fact about the interactions of leptons, and a consequence of the phenomenon it describes contributes to the exclusionary nature of solid matter.
if my Excel spreadsheet is to be believed the chance of a random sample of 10 people containing one or more who understand this stuff is of the order of six sigma.
So I don't think I'm alone in believing that those who do claim to understand it budded off into their own microverse some decades ago!
You can also infer other properties of the particle from its decay products. For example, the conservation of charge means that if you add up all the charges from the debris, and it comes out as +2, then the original particle must have had +2 charge. Measuring spin is more complex, but apparently it can be done.
There are also predictions of what the decay modes actually are. A Higgs may decay into a whole load of different particles, but various conservation rules cause it to prefer some decay modes to others. (The most common is a bottom/anti-bottom quark pair, with a pair of W bosons second.)
So if a particle has the same predicted mass, spin, charge and decay as the predicted Higgs, I'd call it a Higgs.
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