higgs to be or not to be

[bystander]

Higgs Boson Positively Identified
Science NOW | Adrian Cho | 2013 Mar 14

[i]Plainly. An event display shows a Higgs candidate decaying to four electrons in the ATLAS detector. New measurements confirm that the Higgs is a Higgs. [b](Credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN)[/b][/i]

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Eight months ago, physicists working with the world's biggest atom smasher—Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—created a sensation when they reported that they had discovered a particle that appeared to be the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece in their standard model of particles and forces. Today, those researchers reported that the particle does indeed have the basic predicted properties of the standard model Higgs boson, clinching the identification.

"It sure does look like the standard model Higgs boson, you bet," says Sally Dawson, a theorist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, who was not involved with the measurements.

It's a big step, at least semantically. Ever since the new particle was reported last July, officials at the home of the LHC—the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland—have taken great care to describe the new thing as a "Higgs-like particle." Now, a CERN press release calls the particle "a Higgs boson." "That's a big deal for the community," Dawson says.

To make the positive identification, researchers relied not on dental records, but on observations of how the Higgs boson decays into combinations of other, more familiar particles. Key characteristics of the Higgs include its spin and its parity, a symmetry property. They can be determined by looking at correlations in the particle directions when, for example, a Higgs boson decays into two particles called Z bosons, each of which then decays into two particles called muons.

Although not yet entirely conclusive, current measurements show that the new particle has no spin (as opposed to 1 or 2 quantum units of it) and positive parity, researchers reported today at a meeting in La Thuile, Italy. That's exactly what the standard model predicts for the Higgs boson. The measurements were made by teams working independently with two massive particle detectors fed by the LHC, which are known as ATLAS and CMS. The teams simultaneously discovered the Higgs last summer. They have analyzed roughly twice as much data now as they had analyzed then.

Ironically, most physicists had been hoping for more than the standard model's plain vanilla Higgs. "That was certainly my feelings," says Daniel Green, a member of the CMS collaboration from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "Of course, we want to discover something new."

In fact, the new results raise the prospect that the only new thing that the $5.5 billion LHC will produce will be the standard model Higgs boson, an outcome some physicists have described as their nightmare scenario. Physicists working with the LHC say that it's too early to rule out further discoveries. The LHC has been taking data since only 2010 and has collected less than 1% of the data researchers hope to obtain by 2030. Moreover, the LHC has been running at half-energy because of faulty connections between its massive superconducting magnets. It has just shut down for 2 years of repairs that will enable it to run at full energy starting in 2015. "This is a voyage of discovery and we're still in the shallows," Green says.

Once the LHC comes back on, one of the first things that researchers will look for is other Higgs bosons. The standard model includes only one of them. But more-elaborate theories—such as one known as supersymmetry, which posits a more massive partner for every known particle—suggest there could be several. "Why would there be only one Higgs?" Dawson says. "Why wouldn't there be two, three, whatever? There's no reason to preclude it." Dawson says that she won't be willing to give up on the hope for something new until the LHC has collected about a tenth of the aimed-for data set, sometime around 2020.

Until then, CERN officials will surely continue to issue press releases about "a Higgs boson"—and hope that something else comes up before they have to start talking about "the Higgs boson."

Latest results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson
UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council | 2013 Mar 14

Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs
Discovery News | Jeanna Bryner | 2013 Mar 14

Mystery boson earns Higgs status thanks to W particle
New Scientist | Michael Slezak | 2013 Mar 14

Higgs keeps mum about universe's secrets – for now
New Scientist | Michael Slezak | 2013 Mar 14

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The Man Who Coined 'The God Particle'

Explains: It Was A Joke!

by Eyder Peralta, NPR, March 15, 2013

[b][color=#0000FF]Portrait of Peter War Higgs by Ken Currie. Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh, it hangs in the entrance of the James Clerk Maxwell Building of the School of Physics and Astronomy and the School of Mathematics. [/color][/b]

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<<Peter Ware Higgs, CH, FRS, FRSE (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson.

The Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field which confers mass on quarks and leptons. However this causes only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass.

The original basis of Higgs' work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago. Professor Nambu had proposed a theory known as spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in superconductivity in condensed matter; however, the theory predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem), a clearly incorrect prediction. Higgs is reported to have come up with the basic fundamentals of his theory after coming back to his Edinburgh New Town apartment from a failed weekend camping trip to the Highlands, although he has also said that there was no "eureka moment" in the development of the theory. He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's theorem (massless Goldstone particles need not occur when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory} and published it in Physics Letters, a European physics journal edited at CERN, in Switzerland, in 1964.

Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism), but the paper was rejected (the editors of Physics Letters judged it "of no obvious relevance to physics"). Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical Review Letters, another leading physics journal, which published it later in 1964. This paper predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs Boson). Other physicists, Robert Brout and Francois Englert and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble had reached similar conclusions about the same time. In the published version Higgs quotes Brout and Englert and the third paper quotes the previous ones. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration. While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers are noteworthy. The mechanism had been proposed in 1962 by Philip Anderson although he did not include a crucial relativistic model.

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the ATLAS and CMS experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 GeV. Speaking at the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime." Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs Boson was made at the same place where the editor of Physics Letters rejected Higgs paper.>>

Oscar Zoroaster Diggs

<<The Wizard of Oz, known during his reign as The Great and Powerful Oz, is the epithet of Oscar Zoroaster Diggs. Believing he is the only man capable of solving their problems, Dorothy Gale and her friends travel to the Emerald City, the capital of Oz, to meet him. Oz is very reluctant to meet them, but eventually each is granted an audience, one by one. On each of these occasions, the Wizard appears in a different form, once as a giant head, once as a beautiful fairy, once as a ball of fire, and once as a horrible monster. When, at last, he grants an audience to all of them at once, he seems to be invisible—nothing but a disembodied voice.

Oz is actually none of these things, but rather a kind, ordinary man from Omaha, Nebraska, who has been using a lot of elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem "great and powerful." Working as a magician for a circus, he wrote OZ (the initials of his first and middle name) on the side of his balloon for promotional purposes. One day his balloon sailed into the Land of Oz, and he found himself worshipped as a great sorcerer. As Oz had no leadership at the time, he became Supreme Ruler of the kingdom, and did his best to sustain the myth.

In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Oz explains that his real name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. To shorten this name, he used only his initials (O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.), but since they spell out the word pinhead, he shortened his name further and called himself "Oz". In later books, he proves himself quite an inventor, providing devices that aid in various characters’ journeys. He introduces to Oz the use of mobile phones in Tik-Tok of Oz. Some of his most elaborate devices are the Ozpril and the Oztober, balloon-powered Ozoplanes in Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, and intelligent taxis called Scalawagons in The Scalawagons of Oz.>>

[img3="An illustration of the Copernican universe from Thomas Digges' book. The outer inscription on the map reads: "This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling over [the] sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect." "]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... gesmap.JPG[/img3]

<<Thomas Digges (c.1546 – 24 August 1595) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances; he was also first to postulate the "dark night sky paradox". Digges attempted to determine the parallax of the 1572 supernova observed by Tycho Brahe, and concluded it had to be beyond the orbit of the Moon. This contradicted the accepted view of the universe, according to which no change could take place among the fixed stars.

In 1576, he published a new edition of his father's perpetual almanac, A Prognostication everlasting. The text written by Leonard Digges for the third edition of 1556 was left unchanged, but Thomas added new material in several appendices. The most important of these was A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most aunciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans, latelye revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved. Contrary to the Ptolemaic cosmology of the original book by his father, the appendix featured a detailed discussion of the controversial and still poorly known Copernican heliocentric model of the Universe. This was the first publication of that model in English, and a milestone in the popularisation of science.

For the most part, the appendix was a loose translation into English of chapters from Copernicus' book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Thomas Digges went further than Copernicus, however, by proposing that the universe is infinite, containing infinitely many stars, and may have been the first person to do so. According to Harrison: "Copernicus had said little or nothing about what lay beyond the sphere of fixed stars. Digges's original contribution to cosmology consisted of dismantling the starry sphere, and scattering the stars throughout endless space. By grafting endless space onto the Copernican system and scattering the stars throughout this endless space, Digges pioneered... the idea of an unlimited universe filled with the mingling rays of countless stars.">>

[neufer]

It's the Higgs We Have ... But Is It the Higgs We Need?
By Andrew Zimmerman Jones, About.com GuideMarch 16, 2013

<<Getting straight information about the Higgs boson can be hard work. When Time magazine nominated the Higgs boson their "Person of the Year," each sentence in the nomination paragraph contained serious factual errors. (Some of these are errors I've been guilty of, as well, such as calling physicist Peter Higgs a Scottish physicist, even though he was born in England, not Scotland. Sorry for that slip, Dr. Higgs.)

But even in more meaningful ways, the science related to the Higgs boson can be confusing. For example, it's common to say that the Higgs boson is what gives particles mass, but this claim is misleading in many ways. For one thing, it's really the Higgs field that gives the mass, through a process called "the Higgs mechanism." The Higgs boson itself is a rare manifestation of this field as a particle, which only shows up (and can be detected) when a lot of energy is pumped into the field ... such as in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

And the Higgs isn't even needed to explain all of the mass - or even most of the mass - in our universe. Quarks and the particles made up from them - protons and neutrons, for example - all have mass even without incorporating the Higgs mechanism. The masses explained by the Higgs mechanism are the relatively small amount of mass possessed by the W Boson and Z Boson.

The basic (or garden-variety) Higgs boson completes the Standard Model of particle physics by explaining where these masses come from ... and evidence released this week has made it clear that the particle announced last summer by researchers at CERN probably fits the bill. But many theoretical physicists had been hoping for a bit more, because if the LHC had discovered multiple versions of the Higgs boson, it would have provided evidence that would have supported the theoretical physics concept of supersymmetry. This weeks' announcement, which includes analysis of about two and a half times more data than what was available last summer, gives no clear evidence of supersymmetry.

For a while now, there has been talk within the physics community about the need to look for new ideas. The more-standard-than-hoped Higgs leaves scientists in the position of having to really consider abandoning the notions at the heart of supersymmetry, which has been a cornerstone of theoretical physics models beyond the Standard Model for over a quarter century. The failure to actually demonstrate supersymmetry is a serious problem, as suggested in Lee Smolin's 2007 book The Trouble with Physics, but has more recently been taken up by other physicists who are considering what could take supersymmetry's place if the evidence found at the Large Hadron Collider doesn't fit with that model. Young physicists have to really consider whether they want to continue investigating supersymmetry or begin trying to find whole new directions to answer the outstanding great problems in theoretical physics.

More results may be a while in coming. The Large Hadron Collider has shut down for a couple of years, set to go back online in 2015. At that point, it'll come back online with enhancements to its power and, potentially, any Higgs results that would extend beyond the "garden-variety Higgs" might show up at that time, although proving conclusively that this is the Higgs boson will take a few years' worth of data collection.

Even with the data that exists, though, new areas of research are coming to light. Plugging the existing data into the laws of physics as we understand them resulted in a result, announced by a Fermilab scientist last month, that our universe might be unstable. If these results are true, our universe will still have billions of years ... but then will be wiped out as it decays into a more stable alternate universe.>>