Comments on: Making the (Higgs) Sausage

By: A Year Well Blogged | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

A Year Well Blogged | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:33:31 +0000

[...] Making the (Higgs) Sausage, by John [...]

By: Amrit Sorli, Space Life Institute

Amrit Sorli, Space Life Institute — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:12:21 +0000

Mass is an energy form of quantum vacuum in symmetry with diminished energy density of quantum vacuum. Presence of mass diminishes energy density of quantum vacuum respectively to the energy of a given mass. A given particle with a mass diminishes energy density of quantum vacuum, mass-less particle does not diminish energy of quantum vacuum. In order to explain mass of elementary particles this view does not require existence of the hypothetical boson of Higgs.

By: A Tantalizing Hint of the Higgs - IEEE Spectrum

A Tantalizing Hint of the Higgs - IEEE Spectrum — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:18:59 +0000

[...] post on how the CMS and ATLAS teams – each of which boasts thousands of physicists – “make the sausage” (i.e. coordinate the hunt). And theorist Matt Strassler has a good run-down of what these teams [...]

By: John

John — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:38:51 +0000

Curious Wavefunction: this kind of data analysis is indeed being used in many fields, now. Certainly genomics; I am not sure about collaborative drug discovery though.

Egaeus: The Tevatron could have found the Higgs boson in the range 115-180 GeV, in fact. If the mass had been near 160 GeV, it would have been seen! At the low end, near 115 GeV, the Tevatron is still competitive with the LHC, and results are expected soon from the full sample. The Tevatron results are somewhat complementary in that the Tevatron relies on a different production mechanism for the Higgs (WH and ZH, as opposed to gluon fusion). So the Tevatron results will add more information no matter what.

By: Not Being Announced Tomorrow: Discovery of the Higgs Boson | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:35:29 +0000

[...] RSS « Making the (Higgs) Sausage [...]

By: Egaeus

Egaeus — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:35:54 +0000

Can anyone explain to a non-physicist why, if the Higgs does exist in the 119-140 GeV region, it couldn’t be found by the Tevatron? Unfortunately, my physics primarily stopped at Maxwell, with enough quantum theory to understand semiconductors.

By: Curious Wavefunction

Curious Wavefunction — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:24:02 +0000

Pretty interesting. I wonder if this kind of communication and data analysis system can be used for other data-rich fields like collaborative drug discovery or genomics.

By: John

John — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:35:25 +0000

James, my apologies. I changed “United States” to “North America” (so now I have to look up the South American institutions…anyway I said “most”)

Tony Smith: all of CMS and ATLAS public documentation is accessible by anyone. For CMS the link is

https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/PhysicsResults

and for ATLAS it’s

https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic

There is a lot of internal (and much more technical, meaning boring) documentation only accessible to collaboration members. We do need to have internal-only material, for a number of reasons. The main reason is that we only make public our results when they have undergone the full internal review process, so as to avoid any confusion as to what the results really are. The numbers do change during the review process as mistakes are corrected, the calculations refined, and the methods are improved. It would be not very helpful to have the full history out there, interesting as that might be from a sociological point of view. It would be extremely difficult to interpret meaningfully, also, without full access to every email sent by every collaboration member to every other member, which is practically impossible.

By: Tony Smith

Tony Smith — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:42:30 +0000

John, you say that CMS has “… a single website you can drill down into a particular physics group find the analysis you want get links to all the documentation, and follow what’s happening …”.

After the announcement is made public on 13 December 2011, will the public be given access to that website (and the similar site at ATLAS) ?
(by access, I do NOT mean access to alter or modify or post to it,
I ONLY mean read-only access to see the stuff there)

If so, then what will be the link to it ?

If not, then why not, and when if ever ?

Tony

By: James

James — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:25:42 +0000

John,

You say “most are at their home institutions in Europe, United States, and Asia.” However, there are also many people involved in ATLAS who are from Canada, which (contrary to popular culture) is not the 51st American state.

Sorry for splitting hairs here but why not say “Europe, North America, and Asia” instead? I.e. why differentiate the United States so clearly from the rest of the world? It seems to be a bit against the spirit of the international collaboration at CERN.

Otherwise, great post! It is a very interesting time to be a physicist – even in the forgotten country of Canada

By: Kirk

Kirk — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:03:54 +0000

Thanks for the ‘day in the life’ report on this global project. The extent of the analytical eco-system should be required reading for science deniers. Not accepting the results of a global investigation is like not accepting the existence of air and water. No one will deny the results of this effort because – no one can see how this will affect behavior *today*. The change in the world that comes about by understanding the Higgs Field WILL change but in ways we do not understand. Yet. There is very little motivated reasoning or cognitive bias about transistors and lasers because Thor never said anything about either subject AND no one understood how their individual behavior would change when these technologies took science into the world via engineering. With evolution by natural selection and climate change everyone on the denier side is trying to stop the flow of time. As if.

By: Michel

Michel — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:11:24 +0000

Yes, the trigger is actually what I am working on these days, getting ready for 2012 luminosity conditions! Good luck to you too sir! Oh, and very nice post by the way!

By: Sigma: così buoni, così vicini « Tutti a Zanzibar

Sigma: così buoni, così vicini « Tutti a Zanzibar — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:32:11 +0000

[...] Making the (Higgs) Sausage [...]

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:56:06 +0000

Michel, in the early days of the Tevatron Run 2, a decade ago, we did run a two-hadronic-tau trigger in CDF, but eventually had to turn it off due to high rates. But we did manage to perform a generic high-mass di-tau search before abandoning it.

CMS has efforts in the works for this, but ATLAS could well beat us here – we shall see! Good luck!

By: Jefro

Jefro — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:42:01 +0000

I love the transparency you are bringing to the project. Keep up the excellent work, and please keep telling us about it! Very well done.

By: Michel

Michel — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:35:05 +0000

Ah! I am your nemesis then! I am working with taus on the Higgs at ATLAS, although I’m with a smaller group of insane people who decided to tackle the hadronic-hadronic channel… It’s difficult, but that’s exactly what makes it fun. We’re hoping to join the ATLAS combination early next year, but there are many challenges between here and then.

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:38:17 +0000

Anadish: really?

Albert Z: what you suggest could happen…

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:37:02 +0000

Eric #3: don’t take stuff you read on the internet too seriously…

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:36:25 +0000

telecom -> Tevatron (dictate error)

By: Anadish Kumar Pal

Anadish Kumar Pal — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:39:20 +0000

To continue getting funding till 2020, they had no choice but to release some ‘indicative’ data. Now the challenge for my research is to show practically the real gravitational mechanism not only in action but to find a practical application for my discovery.