""In this context. We need it, but so far we can’t find it. This all might change soon — there are seminars scheduled at CERN by both of the big LHC collaborations, to update us on their progress in looking for the Higgs, and there are rumors they might even bring us good news. You know what they say about rumors: sometimes they’re true, and sometimes they’re false.
So we’re very happy to welcome a guest post by Matt Strassler, who is an expert particle theorist, to help explain what’s at stake and where the search for the Higgs might lead. Matt has made numerous important contributions, from phenomenology to string theory, and has recently launched the website Of Particular Significance, aimed at making modern particle physics accessible to a wide audience. Go there for a treasure trove of explanatory articles, growing at an impressive pace.""
———————–
""After this year’s very successful run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, a sense of great excitement is beginning to pervade the high-energy particle physics community. The search for the Higgs particle… or particles… or whatever appears in its place… has entered a crucial stage.
We’re now deep into Phase 1 of this search, in which the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS are looking for the simplest possible Higgs particle. This unadorned version of the Higgs particle is usually called the Standard Model Higgs, or “SM Higgs” for short. The end of Phase 1 looks to be at most a year away, and possibly much sooner. Within that time, either the SM Higgs will show up, or it will be ruled out once and for all, forcing an experimental search for more exotic types of Higgs particles. Either way, it’s a turning point in the history of our efforts to understand nature’s elementary laws.
This moment has been a long time coming. I’ve been working as a scientist for over twenty years, and for a third decade before that I was reading layperson’s articles about particle physics, and attending public lectures by my predecessors. Even then, the Higgs particle was a profound mystery. Within the Standard Model (the equations that used at the LHC to describe all the particles and forces of nature we know about so far, along with the SM Higgs field and particle) it stood out as a bit different, a bit ad hoc, something not quite like the others. It has always been widely suspected that the full story might be more complicated. Already in the 1970s and 1980s there were speculative variants of the Standard Model’s equations containing several types of Higgs particles, and other versions with a more complicated Higgs field and no Higgs particle — with a key role of the Higgs particle being played by other new particles and forces.""
""So what are the possible outcomes of Phase 1?
1) The SM Higgs particle, already known with substantial confidence not to be in the middleweight range, might turn up in the lightweight or heavyweight range.
2) The SM Higgs particle might be entirely excluded, from 115 up to 800 GeV/c2 or so. (Remember, though, that this would not mean there is no Higgs particle of any type — it would mean only that the simplest type is not found in nature.)
3) A Higgs-like particle that is clearly not a Standard Model Higgs particle (because it has the wrong production rates, or the wrong decay rates, given its mass) might be found instead.
3a) Some other great discovery at the LHC might move the SM Higgs search off the front pages for a while.""
A Tremendous Amount of Additional Information Can Be Found In the Rest Of The Article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/12/06/guest-post-matt-strassler-on-hunting-for-the-higgs/
""Important message to all particle physicists: You can stop looking.
I have found your particle, the God particle, a.k.a. the Higgs boson – the particle. It was hiding in plain sight all along. Everything is beginning to make sense now. We can soon enjoy a grand unified theory of everything.
The evidence is rock solid. I see weak. yet indisputable signals in H-NMR, LCMS and on TLC. Hey, I was even able to recrystallize the damn boson from ethanol and water (with hot filtration). More on that in an upcoming full paper in The Sun.""
AND HERE:
No comments:
Post a Comment