Dennis Overbye has written an article in today’s New York Times about blogging about the race for the Higgs (at the Tevatron, and between the Tevtron and LHC), the rumor mill, and all the rest.
Hmmm…I guess that makes this a blog about a news story about blogs. Or something. In any case I think it’s fair to say a good deal of it all started here at CV last January.
Overbye says this is a “summer of rumors, hope, and hype.” But the real message is that the Tevatron has a shot at finding the Higgs, at least if it’s produced at an enhanced rate such as is the case in supersymmetric theories. The article did a nice job of conveying that, I think.
As for the rumors, all I can say is I hear them too - show me the data! (We are working hard on ours, I can assure you…)
July 24th, 2007 at 10:01 am
I noticed the article in the Times this morning but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I love what others apparently consider an excess of information about the going-on at the cutting edge. I can remember years ago having to wait for the rare article in Physics Today or some such occasional source. I enjoy CV and a few other sites that keep the discussions current.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:06 am
It would be very interesting to find this odd particle. Many of us would appreciate a good middle-brow grounded explanation of why there needs to be a particle like the Higgs to provide “mass” (not just inertia, but equivalent energy too!) to other particles. I mean, why can’t mass just be “fundamental”? BTW if we can actually localize Higgs particles at all, then what happens if more are in the region of a given particle? Is it more massive then? How does the quantum field fluctuation issue affect particle masses: they vary a bit moment by moment? (I mean, over and above the energy-time uncertainty, which shouldn’t (?) affect the base rest mass-energy of particles with fixed masses, like electrons.)
It’s funny, since many physicists think “time” isn’t really fundamental in itself. (Well, “flowing time” can’t be defined in strictly logical terms, only “spaces” with various contents can be. Not that many notice that “matter” can’t be logically defined either, as substantive clothing over the structural content of model universes in the platonic mindscape - which I realize many of you are tired of hearing about.) Thanks for any illumination provided.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Are there any viable (I mean non-crackpot) theories of why particles have mass that do not include the Higgs mechanism?
Just curious.
Elliot
July 24th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Elliot,
The only alternative to the Higgs mechanism that I know of is technicolor, and this have essentially been ruled out by experiment.
If this bump turns out to be real, my guess is that it’s either a light superpartner such as the stau, or it could even be a fourth generation quark or lepton.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:26 am
I have nothing useful to say about the Higgs, but wanted to comment on this blog about a news story about blogging, so that later on I can write a blog about me commenting on a blog about a news story about blogging. I suppose if we want a particle physics flavour, it could say something about being a next to next to next to leading order perturbation.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
That “for us, lighter is better” quote was an unfortunate mistake (at least in the standard model). Jacobo should know very well that H -> ZZ at 180 GeV would be _much_ easier to see than H -> gamgam at 115 GeV in the SM at the Tevatron (or LHC).
July 24th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I liked Overbye’s article, but being me, I managed to find some stuff to complain about.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
It’s pretty amusing to be referred to in all these articles as the anonymous physicist who started the internet frenzy….
July 24th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
anon.: Some of us try to use anonymity for good and not for evil
(if what you are referring to is spreading Higgs rumors before they are appropriately confirmed).
July 24th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Ellipsis, the rumor was spreading by word of mouth for weeks before I posted that anonymous comment. I was just hoping to provoke a little more public discussion to clear up the conflicting things I was hearing. I was not trying to provoke a lot of misguided media response….
July 24th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Without the data, any public discussion is speculation and noise. Any while such watercooler conversations are fine among folks who understand things like statistics and collaboration dynamics, once your watercooler is hooked up to the Internet you are inviting misguided responses by all sorts of interlopers.
July 24th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
[…] here (Tommaso Dorigo is also mentioned, and so points to some earlier links too), here, and here (John Conway was also in the article, and has previously discussed these matters […]
July 24th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
anon, ellipsis, and gbob,
Widespread access to the internet makes it more difficult to avoid what some might deem premature publicity. We “interlopers” actually enjoy this state of affairs, having fallen prey to the common foible of defining ourselves as the “us” rather than “them.”
July 24th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I am personally less concerned about collaboration dynamics than nature and statistics. If a collaboration that I happened to be a member of happened to truly be hiding a real result (for some hypothetical unsavory reason — certainly unlikely, but this is _purely_ hypothetical), I would not hesitate to anonymously leak it _if it were in the best interest of the public_. On the other hand, a ??-sigma bump that only a few not-so-experienced members of the collaboration looking at a particular channel claim to observe, and which hasn’t been reasonably carefully internally reviewed — clearly that’s hardly time to put on the Deep Throat suit and meet in the underground parking lot of the internet.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
In addition to strong dynamics of the conventional type,
a la technicolor, extra dimensions provides an alternative
way to generate the masses of the fermions and gauge
bosons in the Standard Model by used boundary conditions
on extra-dimensional wave functions. There were a number of papers on this a couple of years ago begun by Csaki & coworkers & then analyzed by many authors. This approach is testable at the LHC.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Observation from the layperson…
It is continually amazing how many threads here bifurcate into 1) the science 2) the sociological aspects of the science.
This is NOT a criticism but it is certainly a demonstrable phenomenon.
Elliot
July 24th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Why do supersymmetric theories indicate advanced production of higgs? Additional ways that it can be generated outside of the standard model?
July 24th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
gbob:
I dunno, I think the fact that, due to the internet, that we now get to hear what those watercooler discussions sound like is lots of fun. Just so long as it is indicated that they are water-cooler discussions.
July 25th, 2007 at 1:10 am
I thought the most interesting factoid to pop out of the article is that where one group found a bump the other found a deficit. Isn’t that non-quantum?
July 25th, 2007 at 3:32 am
“show me the data!” - John! I hope you don’t think we are trying to hide something here: of course we are also working hard on the data. Many dedicated people in D0 are working long hours to prepare a large number of analyses for the summer conferences that are coming up. And only the analyses that D0 thinks are ready for prime time are going to be released to the public. Please remember: we didn’t start the rumor! We would much much much much much prefer that none of this had ever happened: it is making work much more difficult! So, please be nice!
July 25th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I’m sure that getting the “inside baseball” feel of Science As It Happens from a physics blog provides vicarious entertainment for the masses (pun intended), and may even be informative, but it also has potentially detrimental effects to the public perception of science and (as Gordon points out) even to getting the science done. I thought the Overbye article did a good job of explaining the uncertainties, but the very fact that we have to have this discussion at all, and that Gordon and others have to spend time discussing hypothetical non-results with the media (and presuambly, trying to squelch any further “leaks”) instead of nailing down their systematic errors is unfortunate.
The real irony will be when the initial LHC Higgs results, whatever the are, get leaked through an internet blog. Then CERN will be sorry about inventing this whole Web thing.
July 25th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I have to say that I don’t at all see what the problem is. The phenomenon of experimental physicists excited by what they are doing letting their colleagues know this and dropping hints about what they’re working on is not exactly a new one, and why not let any of the public who care (and are paying the bills) in on this? The blogs that discussed these rumors did so in a responsible way, careful to make as accurate as possible statements. Tommaso Dorigo in particular repeatedly pointed out that statistically marginal results were very unlikely to be something really new.
The bottom line is that, on the whole, a variety of people (including Lykken’s string theorists who don’t even know how to spell “Higgs”) are a lot more interested in and excited by what the Tevatron experimentalists are doing than they were before all this started, while well aware that no solid claims have yet been made by the experimental groups. Again, where’s the problem?
July 25th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
You should ask Dorigo what’s wrong with it. I don’t think this affair is going to have a particulary postive effect on his career and future opportunities in science. Even in the private sector, would a company that devoleps new technology for commercial uses want someone on the payroll who might leak proprietary information?
July 25th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
the Tevatron has a shot at finding the Higgs, at least if it’s produced at an enhanced rate such as is the case in supersymmetric theories.
Well… I’m a bit confused about that. What the article says is:
So this seems to be saying that the normal standard model is incompatible with a Higgs Boson which is low-mass enough to make the rumored Tevatron bump real, but that supersymmetric theories would incidentally predict a variation on the Higgs which could have made that bump. That sounds reasonable enough.
But: “One of five”? Why does supersymmetry result in five Higgs Bosons? And is this a necessary side-effect of supersymmetry, or just something that some but not all supersymmetric theories include? Looking at the wikipedia entry on the MSSM, it seems to claim there are only two variants on the Higgs in the MSSM– the Higgs and the Higgsino.
Is the idea that the NYT meant to say that the rumored bump couldn’t have been the Higgs, but it could have been the Higgsino, and the “five” was just an error?
Is it necessarily known that the Higgsino must be lighter than the Higgs?
July 25th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
In supersymmetric theories, it’s impossible to give mass to both the up-type and down-type quarks with a single Higgs doublet. So, the MSSM requires two complex Higgs doublets. Keep in mind that a doublet contains two complex fields which each have a real and imaginary part, for a total of eight fields.
Three of the Higgs fields are absorbed to make the W and Z massive, which leaves two charged and three neutral massive Higgs particles. The lightest of these is what is being looked for at the Tevatron.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Anyone who thinks scientific info from any government-funded scientific collaboration is proprietary information of the collaboration itself is quite mistaken. Fundamentally, the science belongs 100% to the taxpayers that fund it, _not_ to the collaboration. This should be quite clear. The issue with premature release of results is not “proprietary information”, but the large potential for misleading the public — something that the public itself does not want.
Perhaps the most damaging example of this was not actually with a scientific result, but with a cost estimate. The cost estimate for the SSC was prematurely released to the public and was incomplete and far lower than the actual cost turned out to be. Then, as Congress kept getting steady and large increases in the project cost as the project got more well-defined, opposition slowly and steadily built. There are _many_ other turns to that story, but we all know how it ended. Premature and nebulous cost estimates did great damage to public and Congressional opinion of the SSC.
Analogously, if multiple nebulous “discoveries” of the Higgs are continually released and turn out to be garbage — needless to say, HEP will lose credibility (especially if the Higgs doesn’t even exist, who knows at this exact point in time, it certainly might not). That’s in absolutely nobody’s best interest. Determine a result, take the time and effort to get it right, and _only then_ publicly announce it, is the time-tested right way of doing things.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Eric, interesting, thanks.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Coin:
Another version of what Eric says above:
Standard model:
(4 fields) - (3 absorbed) = 1 Higgs field
N=2 supersymmetry:
(4 x 2 = 8 fields) - (3 absorbed) = 5 Higgs fields
There are also 5 Higgsino fields, but depending on the exact supersymmetric parameters, some can mix with other neutral spin-1/2 fields such as the Zino, photino, etc. to form so-called “neutralino” and “chargino” fields. Higgsinos (or neutralinos) will have very different decay signatures than a Higgs (due to the fact that supersymmetric particles have a different so-called “R-parity” than normal ones, and in most sensible supersymmetric models this R-parity value is conserved), thus it is extremely unlikely a Higgsino would be seen on a Higgs search.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Ellipsis,
I don’t really think the analogy of Higgs rumors to SSC cost estimates holds much water. Bad cost estimates were undoubtedly part of the SSC story, but from what I remember they weren’t rumors but issued officially by the people responsible for doing so as part of the budget process.
Sure, if rumors keep coming out about a Tevatron Higgs that all turn out to be unfounded, people will stop paying attention to the rumors. I don’t think this at all affects the credibility of results officially released by the collaborations. People who are interested enough to follow this story know the difference between a rumor and a published result.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Peter,
You could be right, as it’s not a well-defined thing I don’t think there’s any good way of knowing. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the risk of HEP’s reputation, and I would object to collaborators of mine releasing any sort of “hints” before an official and carefully checked release.
July 26th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Eric (8:47 PM) and Ellipsis (9:03 PM),
Many thanks.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Ellipsis, Eric, and any one else interested:
After looking at your discussion of the messy proliferation of new fields etc., I don’t think anyone can honestly refer to the fundamental physical situation as being “simple” any more.
(Fun commenter fact: I’m #1, 2, 3 and 4 in Google search for “quantum measurement paradox”! Check it out, I may be on to something …
Link #1)
July 26th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Peter Voit,
I agree, in spirit, with your posts and also agree that Ellipsis’ analogy in his 8:50 PM post is irrelevant. The point Ellipsis makes in his 12:10 AM post is more telling and troubles me also.
I can understand that members of a collaboration are annoyed by the leaking (more like dribbling) of incompletely analyzed results. It both steals their thunder and creates a pressure. Expressions of concern about the effects of such leaks on future support for HEP may be more of a rationalization of that annoyance than the cause of the annoyance.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Neil,
I don’t think adding an extra Higgs doublet makes things more complicated or less simple. In fact it makes the theory much more natural in my humble opinion. It’s even possible to dynamically explain electroweak symmetry breaking within the MSSM, something that must be put in by hand otherwise.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:51 am
OK, things looks messy at face value, but I realize that isn’t the whole story. Where can we find a good discussion of those points?
tx
July 26th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Totally off-topic comment, time being of the essence: There will be a 1 hour webcast with Bob Morse about project IceCube at 3 PM CT today (Thursday). Go to www.icecube.wisc.edu and click on “Here on Earth”.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Some decent textbook resources are David Griffiths, _Introduction to Elementary Particles_; Donald Perkins, _Introduction to High Energy Physics_; and Halzen & Martin, _Quarks & Leptons_, amongst others. I would recommend them, in that order.
Yes, things _are_ somewhat messy in supersymmetry, but one needs to remember that there are a lot of questions that need to be answered and a _whole lot of data_ that it needs to fit.
Questions that it needs to addressed _in some degree_: 1) unification of the strong force with the electroweak force, 2) the dark matter problem, 3) why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter (BAU — baryon asymmetry of the universe), 4) why the Higgs mass doesn’t tend toward enormous values (the Planck scale) in contradiction with its needing to be below ~1 TeV to account for observed electroweak unification. It is interesting that something that doesn’t at first sight have anything to do with these problems — a symmetry between integer spin particles and half-integer spin particles, can _both_ help address these problems _and_ be consistent with the data.
However, supersymmetry does introduce a very large number of free parameters (the masses of all the supersymmetric particles, how they mix with each other, etc.). Many of these free parameters are already fairly tightly constrained by present data, but no supersymmetric particles have, to this date, been observed. We will see, at the Tevatron and the LHC (probably primarily the latter) whether it exists or not.
July 26th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Brian,
Not sure what the problem is. Would you like to hear garbage results? No shortage of those when the checking procedures are lax. Just a few years ago not just one, but _about eight_ different collaborations announced that they had discovered pentaquarks — bound states of 5 quarks. Almost certainly all complete garbage — other collaborations checked more carefully and they don’t appear to exist. Now a several scientists look like fools (sometimes justified, sometimes not). It is very easy, even for experienced people, to get fooled by the data — and by career pressures. And then the wool gets pulled over the eyes of the public.
And you may be surprised to hear that the “boundary” between “official” results and pure leaks and rumors can often get incredibly fuzzy. Remember that you have, in several collaborations, 500+ collaborators giving talks _all the time_ at universities, labs, and conferences all over the world. Sometimes a fraction of these talks are vetted beforehand by a speakers’ bureau, but that’s usually only about 1/3 of the talks, on average. The ~2/3 majority are people that have been individually invited. You obviously can’t control what people say. It is purely through the good will (sometimes absent!) of collaborators that garbage “Nobel-prize winning discoveries” from collaboration X are not constantly presented to audiences, in the name of people wanting faculty positions, etc. And _often_ that good will is absent. This is why good modern collaborations try to be careful about making a distinction between approved and unapproved results, and being careful about what is approved and banning collaborators from releasing unapproved results.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Damn, I paid some guy a hundred bucks for a ring with a “pentaquark” in it!
July 26th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Hi,
An insolent ranting of Dr. Dorigo on account of fascinating paper on future influence at the LHC by Nielsen and Ninomiya lead me to re-call some of the papers by Nielsen. Particularly this one :
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?eprint=hep-ph/9511371
Paper is done in 1995. CDF&D0 just measured top mass quark the time to be 180 +- 12 GeV. The paper predicts mass of top to be 173 +- 5 GeV and mass of Higgs to be 135 +- 9 GeV
The paper DOES not use experimental quark mass value as an input, it relies on alpha_s and M_plank and works from the first principles.
I understand that currently the mass of the top is: 174.2 ± 3.3 GeV, so the prediction by
Neilsen and Froggatt made in 1995 is remarkably precise. So, would Higgs mass be as precise as
the top mass they predict? Another predictions by them - no new physics up to Plank scale, and in particular no super-symmetry. This paints a bleak picture for Tevatron as this is the range of masses
where it is the least sensitive (accroding to the plot by Tevatron Higgs sensitivity Group Study) .
Nor the pictutre is bright for the LHC as there will be no new physics found except the expected Higgs at the predicted mass.
I would love if a theorist may please comment on this paper, as I, obviously, do not qualify to judge it.
Thanks,
f15mos