Physics

Has LHC observed "the" Higgs boson or do we have to deal with something more exotic? After the seminar held on July the 4th at Cern, many online newspapers have published titles reporting the "discovery" of the Higgs boson, better the "god particle", but there are questions whether it is or not the Higgs boson or if we are dealing with a more exotic particle belonging to an unknown physics. In my view, one of the most important result is that the particle is a scalar boson, observed for the first time. Moreover, the two values ​​of the mass as measured by ATLAS and CMS detectors are very…

I cannot resist stealing the picture below, courtesy "IoNonFaccioNiente", the blog of Paolo Valente. Some context for foreigners is needed: the Italian government, in a rather untimely and shocking move, announced a 10% budget cut to the 2013 INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics that pays my salary and significantly contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. The cut is unheard-of and it is "devastating", in the words of the INFN president Fernando Ferroni (pictured below before and after the government action). Humor aside, since INFN pays salaries with 55% of its…

Want to get into a bar fight at a physics conference? Argue that quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Or argue the opposite. A new paper argues that quantum mechanics is close to optimal in terms of its predictive power but even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain quantum mechanics experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand. Optimal but unpredictable? The best but often not good enough? Quantum mechanics is a confusing dichotomy, basically the LeBron James of the physics world. Einstein and the giants of his day could not…

The path of the LHC experiments to the successful observation of a Higgs boson has not been the smoothest I could think of, with delays in construction, incidents, and the like; but we are finally there. And now, with over 10/fb of data fully analyzed and presented at ICHEP, we can take stock and draw the "summer 2012" picture on existing and non-existing subnuclear entities, the non-existing ones notably including SUSY particles and other new physics candidates which are periodically evoked by theorists to mend the shortcomings of the standard model. The shortcomings of the standard model!…

I realize I owe an apology to my ATLAS colleagues. In a post-Higgs-announcement article where I was listing some random "post-mortem" considerations, I wrote a paragraph which could be read as an accusation of malpractice in one of the recent ATLAS analyses. I was misled by the fact that I had no access to the details of theactual results being shown at ICHEP on the matter -my information was partial and I was not sure whether it was public or not; it was second-hand and I had no way to check its real source. When I wrote that paragraph I was aware that its contents could be potentially…

The Higgs has been discovered, so this is the last of my Monday/Tuesday weekly blogs.  Blogging at Science 2.0 achieved my primary goal: debunking my GEM unified field proposal.  Part of that work suggested there was "no stinkin' Higgs".  The announcement from the LHC on July 4 of the Higgs discovery showed that technical speculation was in error. Don't believe the 1 in a million of being wrong PR however.  The spin of the particle detected remains to be shown in the data. I am using the Higgs discovery as an excuse to stop weekly blogging.  It is a huge effort to…

What I enjoy most is upsetting my own apple cart, presumptions about how things are as provided by my earliest teachers.  The image I learned about real numbers has negative numbers on the left, positive numbers on the right, and a zero sitting in the middle, with the integers marked out as even as can be:One of the things I have struggled to learn is about the real numbers and the group Z2 which consists of only two numbers, {-1, +1}.  It still sounds like an empty statement to discuss the group Z2 over the real numbers.  The group Z2 is a way of introducing the minus sign to…

Okay, so after the wondeful announcement of two days ago, we have the rest of our life to take stock. But we need not wait until we get old, so let me begin today by listing some "ex post" thoughts related to the Higgs hunt and discovery. I imagine I will have more thoughts as this thing cools off, but here is something to start with. - ATLAS and CMS jointly discover the Higgs boson. They get to exactly the same level of significance (5.0 sigma) using the same final states (photon pairs and Z boson pairs decaying in turn into pairs of electrons or muons; CMS also analyzed other final states,…

Yesterday the Italian newspaper "Il Manifesto" featured two pieces written by yours truly on the discovery of the Higgs boson. I was delighted to have a chance to write for that newspaper, which has an illustrious history and is totally independent (and on the verge of being shut down). By the way, I must thank Peter Woit who suggested the reporters of the newspaper to contact me for the piece. The articles are in Italian, but I can make an effort at translating them for you here. First of all the links: the web version of the main piece is here, and the pdf scan of the paper version (the…

I am seeing H everywhere this morning ! The picture below was taken yesterday near CERN, but today, upon walking to my department, I see H reflected on the front windows too...