Higgs

[Jam]

Rumor has it that they saw (the shadow and the footprint of) the Higgs boson. If confirmed, this could be the scientific discovery of the century.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1642672.html

Physicists say they have all but proven that the "God particle" exists.
[...]
Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have nearly confirmed the primary plank of a theory that could restructure the understanding of why matter has mass

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/high...-1226414371629

The Higgs boson is nothing less than the cornerstone of modern physics. It's the hypothetical particle that endows other elementary paritcles with mass, according to the standard model which describes the interactions of all known subatomic particles and forces.
[...]
it's known as the "God particle"
[...]
CERN will hold a scientific seminar July 4, at 5pm Melbourne time, at which ATLAS project leader Fabiola Gianotti and CMS leader Joe Incandela will deliver preliminary results [...]

And leaked video with the announcement
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...-leaked-video/

[LargoWinch]

Re: Higgs

Thanks for posting Jam. This is the kind of potential discovery news that makes iTulip "above and beyond".

[rdc2008]

Re: Higgs

How does one "all but prove something" exactly...?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Higgs

I took physics in Uni.......but I have to admit when it comes to this god particle thingie I probably understand it about as well as my dog understands how to drive my truck.........I'm like him....just along for the ride.

[unlucky]

Re: Higgs

I took physics in Uni.......but I have to admit when it comes to this god particle thingie I probably understand it about as well as my dog understands how to drive my truck.........I'm like him....just along for the ride.

Sounds like there is still an outside chance they won't find it, although diminishing now. I'd been hoping that they would prove it doesn't exist, as that would be more likely to lead to new advances in physics.

I take a passive interest in physics as - like you - it's what I studied as an undergraduate. In my view, the challenge for physicists for quite a few decades now has been the difficulty of pushing experiments to the point where novel effects that go beyond current quantum theory start to show up. (Such effects must show up eventually because quantum theory and gravity currently don't work together). If they find the Higgs boson, that may show that even the new LHC does not pack a big enough punch to generate new effects. Pity.

[don]

Re: Higgs

Joe Incandela, a CERN spokesman, right, gestured next to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN's director general, during a press conference at the organization's offices near Geneva on Wednesday.

A New Particle Could Be Physics’ Holy Grail

By DENNIS OVERBYE

ASPEN, Colo. — Physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a potential key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

“I think we have it,” said Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN, in an interview from his office outside of Geneva, calling the discovery “a historic milestone.” His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end for one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science. If scientists are lucky, the discovery could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began.

Dr. Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, one of the heaviest subatomic particles yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many particles yet to be discovered . The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. For now, some physicists are calling it a “Higgs-like” particle.

“It’s great to discover a new particle but you have find out what its properties are,” said John Ellis, a theorist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Joe Incandela, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and spokesperson for one of two groups reporting data on Wednesday called the discovery, “very, very significant. It’s something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example.”

Here at the Aspen Center for Physics, a retreat for scientists that will celebrate its 50th birthday on Saturday, the sounds of cheers and popping corks reverberated early Wednesday morning against the Sawatch Range through the Roaring Fork valley of the Rockies, as bleary-eyed physicists watched their colleagues read off the results in a Webcast from CERN. It was a scene duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Princeton, New York, London, and beyond — everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe.

At CERN itself, 1,000 people stood in line all night to get into the auditorium, according to Guido Tonelli, a CERN physicist who said the atmosphere was like a rock concert. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a standing ovation.

Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. And it reaffirms a grand view of a universe ruled by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws, but in which everything interesting in it, such as ourselves, is due to flaws or breaks in that symmetry.

According to the Standard Model, which has ruled physics for 40 years now, the Higgs boson is the only visible and particular manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles that would otherwise be massless with mass. Particles wading through it would gain heft.

Without this Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, physicists say all the elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

Physicists said that they would probably be studying the new Higgs particle for years. Any deviations from the simplest version of the boson — and there are hints of some already — could open a gateway to new phenomena and deeper theories that answer questions left hanging by the Standard Model: What, for example, is the dark matter that provides the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies? And why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter?

“If the boson really is not acting standard, then that will imply that there is more to the story — more particles, maybe more forces around the corner,” Neal Weiner, a theorist at New York University, wrote in an email, “What that would be is anyone’s guess at the moment.”

One intriguing candidate for the next theory they have been on the watch for is called supersymmetry, “SUSY” for short, which would come with a whole new laundry list of particles to be discovered, one of which might be the source of dark matter. In supersymmetry there are at least two Higgs bosons.

Dr. Incandela said, “The whole world thinks there is one Higgs, but there could be many of them.”

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and chair of the physics center board, said, “This is a big moment for particle physics and a crossroads — will this be the high water mark or will it be the first of many discoveries that point us toward solving the really big questions that we have posed?”

Wednesday’s announcement is also an impressive opening act for the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics machine, which collides protons and only began operating two years ago. It is still running at only half power.

Physicists had been holding their breaths and perhaps icing the champagne ever since last December. Two teams of about 3000 physicists each — one named Atlas, led by Fabiola Gianotti and the other CMS, led by Dr. Incandela —operate giant detectors in the collider, sorting the debris from the primordial fireballs left after proton collisions. Last winter they both reported hints of the same particle. They were not able, however, to rule out the possibility that it was a statistical fluke.

Since then the collider has more than doubled the number of collisions it has recorded.

The new results capped three weeks of feverish speculation and internet buzz as the physicists, who had been sworn to secrecy, did a break-neck analysis of some 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the last two years. They were racing to get ready for a major conference in Melbourne that started on Wednesday and where they had promised an update on the Higgs search.

In the end, the CERN council, which consists of representatives from each of CERN’s 20 member states, decided that the potentially historic announcement should come from the lab’s own turf first.

Up until last weekend, physicists from inside were reporting that they themselves did not know what the outcome would be, though many were having fun with the speculation.

“HiggsRumors” became one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter. The particle also acquired its own iPhone app, a game called “Agent Higgs.” Expectations soared when it was learned that the five surviving originators of the Higgs boson theory, including Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, had been invited to the CERN news conference.

On the eve of the announcement, in what was an embarrassing moment for the lab where the Web was invented, a video of Dr. Incandela’s making his statement was posted to the Internet and then quickly withdrawn.Dr. Incandela said he had made a series of video presentations with alternate conclusions so that the video producers would not know the right answer ahead of time, but the one that was right just happened to get posted.

But the December signal was no fluke.

Like Omar Sharif materializing out of a distant sandstorm into a man on horseback in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” what was once a hint of a signal has grown over the last year, until it practically jumps off the chart, according to those who have seen it.

“I believe it now, I didn’t before,” said a physicist who was one of the first to see the new results but was not authorized to discuss them.

The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy —Einstein showed they are the same — that are favored by physicists, about as much as a whole Barium atom, according to the CMS group, and 126 according to Atlas.

Both groups said that the likelihood their signal was due to a chance fluctuation was less than one chance in 3.5 million, so-called “five sigma,” which is the gold standard in physics for a discovery.

On that basis, Dr. Heuer said that he had decided only Tuesday afternoon to call the Higgs result a “discovery.”
He said, “I know the science, and as director general I can stick out my neck.”

Dr. Incandela and Dr. Gianotti’s presentations were constantly interrupted by applause as they showed slide after slide of data bumps rising like mountains from the sea.

Fabiola Gianotti, of CERN and spokeswoman for the Atlas team, said one on point, “Why are you applauding, I’m not done yet. This is just beginning, there is more to come.”

She noted that the mass of the putative Higgs made it easy to study its many behaviors and channels, “So,” she said, “thanks, nature.”

Gerald Guralnik, one of the founders of the Higgs theory, said he was glad to be at a physics meeting “where there is applause like a football game.”

Asked to comment after the announcements, Dr. Higgs seemed overwhelmed, saying, “For me, its really an incredible thing that’s happened in my lifetime.”

In quantum theory, which is the language of particle physicists, elementary particles are divided into two rough categories: fermions, which are bits of matter like electrons; and bosons, which are bits of energy and can transmit forces, like the photon that transmits light.

Dr. Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, was one of six physicists, working in three independent groups, who in 1964 invented the notion of the cosmic molasses, or Higgs field. The others were Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl Hagen of University of Rochester, Dr. Guralnik of Brown University, and Francois Englert and the late Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles.

One implication of their theory was that this cosmic molasses, normally invisible and, of course, odorless, would produce its own quantum particle if hit hard enough, by the right amount of energy. The particle would be fragile and fall apart within a millionth of a second in a dozen different ways depending upon its own mass.

Unfortunately, the theory did not say how much this particle should weigh, which is what made it so hard to find. The pesky particle eluded researchers at a succession of particle accelerators, including the Large Electron Positron collider at CERN, which closed down in 2000, and the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., which shut down last year.

Along the way the Higgs boson achieved a notoriety rare for abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab, called it the “God particle,” in his book of the same name, later quipping that he had wanted to call it “the Goddamn particle.”

Finding the missing boson was one of the main goals of Large Hadron Collider.

Both Dr. Heuer and Dr. Gianotti said they had not expected the search to succeed so quickly, a tribute they said, to the people who had built the collider and the detectors and learned to run them efficiently. “It’s truly amazing,” said Lisa Randall, a prominent Harvard theorist.

Dr. Heuer recently extended the current run of the collider an extra three months, to the end of the year, during which the experimenters say they expect to triple their data on the new particle, narrowing some its possible identities.

The collider will then shut down for two years for major repairs. When it starts up again, theories of both inner space and outer space could be up for grabs.

Although they have never been seen, Higgs-like fields play an important role in theories of the universe and in string theory.

Under certain conditions, according to the strange accounting of Einsteinian physics, they can become suffused with energy that exerts an anti-gravitational force. Such fields have been proposed as the source of an enormous burst of expansion, known as inflation, early in the universe, and, possibly, as the secret of the dark energy that now seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe.

Knowing more about the new particle will help put those theories on firmer ground, Dr. Turner of Chicago said.

So far the physicists admit, they know little. The CERN results are mostly based on measurements of two or three of the dozen different ways, or “channels,” by which a Higgs boson could be produced and then decay.

There are hints, but only hints so far, that some of the channels are overproducing the Higgs while others might be underproducing, clues maybe that there is more than the Standard Model at work.

“This could be the first in a ring of discoveries,” said Dr. Tonelli.

CERN will be examining the rest of the channels over the coming months and years, but the extra bounty of Higgs bosons suggests that the Standard Model is cracking, a prospect that the physicists find thrilling.

In an email, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team at CERN wrote about the Higgs, “I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/sc...ef=global-home

[don]

Re: Higgs

NOVA

[c1ue]

Re: Higgs

Hopefully the CERN funding - always a concern when 2 years of major repairs are involved - wasn't a factor in the 'find':

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1092437...08-001-Eng.pdf

The cost for the machine alone is about 4.6 billion CHF (about 3
billion Euro). The total project cost breaks down roughly as follows:

Construction costs	Personnel	Materials	Total (BCHF)
CERN share to Detectors	0.92	3.68	4.60*)
LHC Machine and areas	0.78	0.31	1.09
LHC injector upgrade	0.09	0.07	0.16
LHC computing (CERN share)	0.09	0.09	0.18
Total	1.88	4.15	6.03
*) (including 0.43 BCHF of in-kind contributions)

The experimental collaborations are individual entities, funded independently
from CERN. CERN is a member of each experiment, and
contributes to the material budget of CMS and LHCb at the 20%
level, 16% for ALICE and 14% for ATLAS. TOTEM is a much smaller
experiment, with a total material cost of about 6.5 million CHF, of
which CERN provides 30% of the budget.
NB: 1 billion = 1 thousand million.

6 billion Swiss francs = slightly more than US$6 billion right now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...-cuts-spending

Big reductions in the UK's scientific research capacity will be necessary if planned 25% cuts to government spending in the sector go ahead, the director of one of the country's main science funding bodies warned tonight.

...

Officials from the STFC fear the cuts may also jeopardise Britain's involvement in Cern, the Geneva-based home of the Large Hadron Collider particle research project, documents seen by the Guardian show.

http://physics.about.com/b/2009/05/1...leave-cern.htm

In the 55-year history of CERN, Austria marks only the third nation to have dropped out of CERN participation. The first was Yugoslavia in 1961, with Spain following in 1969 (though they since rejoined in 1983).

http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspi...ce-cern-funds/

Greece’s austerity measures over the last four years have included a temporary reduction in the country’s annual payment to the European Space Agency and a 30% reduction in national research funding. Now Konstantinos Kokkinoplitis, the country’s general secretary for research and technology, is facing a €10 million ($13 million) budget shortfall. He must choose between lowering Greece’s global science presence further or making additional funding cuts to 11 national resource centers. Last month, directors of those centers met with Kokkinoplitis and discussed reducing Greece’s €17 million annual subscription to CERN. One option would be for CERN to pay half of Greece’s subscription this year and be reimbursed in 2013 or 2014. Another option would be to reduce the amount of matching funds that Greece is required to contribute to European Union–backed projects. Kokkinoplitis has started negotiations with CERN to work out details.

[LargoWinch]

Re: Higgs

[BadJuju]

Re: Higgs

http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matt...vealed-1.10951

"Direct measurement of a dark-matter ‘filament’ confirms its existence in a galaxy supercluster."

"...calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 10¹³ and 9.8 × 10¹³ times the mass of the Sun."

[unlucky]

Re: Higgs

Hopefully the CERN funding - always a concern when 2 years of major repairs are involved - wasn't a factor in the 'find':

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1092437...08-001-Eng.pdf

6 trillion Swiss francs = slightly more than US$6 trillion right now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...-cuts-spending

I think that should be 6 billion, rather than 6 trillion. You could probably bail-out a small bank (balance sheet up to $20B) for a roughly equivalent final cost.

The return on the investment is likely to be huge. Thousands of physicists have flocked to Europe to work on this project - a mirror image of the migration from Europe to the US that occurred in the 1st half of the 20th century? http://www.nature.com/news/2008/0809...2008.1094.html
Already the CERN folks like to justify their cost by pointing out they invented the world wide web, which is a somewhat cheeky argument as the WWW is not directly physics related and would probably have been invented elsewhere anyway. Nevertheless physics breakthroughs have always led to enormous technology returns in the past so there's every reason to be hopeful.

I guess the US may have to dust off its plans for the super conducting super-collider. It was cancelled in 1993 due to the estimated cost at $12 billion. The contemporaneous savings and loan scandal cost US taxpayers an estimated $124 billion. The high cost of financial catastrophes is great for justifying money spent on other grandiose projects

[LargoWinch]

Re: Higgs

I guess the US may have to dust off its plans for the super conducting super-collider. It was cancelled in 1993 due to the estimated cost at $12 billion. The contemporaneous savings and loan scandal cost US taxpayers an estimated $124 billion. The high cost of financial catastrophes is great for justifying money spent on other grandiose projects

The MIC is also staggering with annual expenditures of over $900B. That means that one US super-collider is "spent" every 5 days (providing costs of $12B as an example).