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

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.

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.

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.

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)