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Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev 76

Posted by chrisd from the standard-model-in-trouble dept.
Larry writes "The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."
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Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev More

Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev

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  • No need to restructure everything just yet... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gaber ( 157796 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @08:57PM (#2662854)
    They haven't ruled out the existence of the Higgs by any means.

    LEP couldn't probe the entire range of energies where the Higgs might reside, and there wasn't compelling evidence that they would be able to. That's why LEP was shut down; scientists at CERN wanted to begin work on LHC, which will replace LEP by 2005 (IIRC).

    Now the search for (and discovery of?) the Higgs will probably take place at Fermilab and LHC.

    And this business of requiring a "major restructuring" of current physics models is just exaggeration. People propose extensions to the standard model all the time; it's just that the standard model has described current observations and predicted new (and eventually confirmed) ones very well. There's no need to throw the entire thing out.

    -Gabe
    • From what I have heard, unless the luminosity of Run II at Fermilabs increases drastically they will not have a high enough cross section to find the Higgs, assuming it exists. We can only hope they do find it so that we don't have to wait until we receive data from the LHC.
  • Was some heavy shit. Took me damn near an hour just to meta-moderate a bit for it.

  • You have to remember it is still only a theory... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by -douggy ( 316782 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:50PM (#2663071)
    As Richard Feynman said "If it disagress with experiment, no matter who said it, or how elegant it is, if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."

    While the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field are very compelling and I am certainly not advanced enough in that area of physics to judge Higgs and the other creators of the standard model perhaps there is no Higgs Boson!

    I have no real other way of explaining but a lot of things would be nice if there were a drag for a "mystery field" like the ether of the 19th century, hopefully 21st century physics and mathematics will be able to tell us where this mass and inertia comes from.
    • Not necessarily true. What the experiments have found is that the Higgs must have an energy over 115 GeV. According to the Standard Model, this is OK. The Standard Model can't predict what the Higgs energy will be - it's an experimental parameter.

      So nothing's broken yet. It just seems that if there is a Higgs boson, it's very massive and will require big accelerators to find.
    • However, Feynman had a -correct- idea about what makes an experiment.

      Strict scientific method has VERY VERY limiting ideas about what an experiment is, and just poking at something to see what happens isn't that.

      So, unless you have removed all variables EXCEPT the Higgs boson, an experiment can't prove or disprove the existance of the Higgs boson. It can just be misinterpreted.
    • I just thought of this. I'm sure it's wrong so someone please enlighten me, I love learning about this stuff, but here goes...

      In quantum mechanics, a true vacuum with "nothing" there does not seem to exist. Instead, they theorize that a soup of virtual particles randomly pop into existence, combine again (particle/antiparticle), and annihalate each other.

      Now, what if, when one of these particles were created, something (rather energy, matter, or a field of some sort) collided with one of the particles in the pair? Would this provide the
      "drag"? Could the collision every so often knock a particle so significantly off its course that it failed to reunite with its anti-particle and be destroyed? Would this explain dark matter?

      No, I'm obviously not a physicist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night ;-)

  • Opinion of expert (Score:2, Informative)

    by Mt._Honkey ( 514673 )
    I attended a lecture by a senior researcher at LEP at CERN, and I saw many various collision images. They showed many of the simultanius bottom quark/anti bottom quark decays that you would expect from about 70% of Higgs decays. It looked convincing, but I do suppose that it could be background. As much as I don't want the higgs to exist, it did look good.
    • I have looked at the data. There were a total of 4 events in only one of the three experiments. The data that seemed to say that the Higgs existed also looked a lot like systematic error. I want to see the Higgs discovered but I do not like it when people jump the gun.

  • Here's my theory. Also, I'm stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

    by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @11:04PM (#2663314) Homepage
    I believe the universe is a simulation.

    It's natural that the quantum state of a particle is not known until it's observed. Why would you render all this detail out when nobody's watching? It would be the same as Quake rendering things behind you.

    The same situation would explain why sometimes objects behavior only makes sense at a macro-level - objects are only being rendered out that far. Quake doesn't compute motion for each polygon - it moves things in groups.

    Only when we're looking at one pixel (I mean particle...) does the universe render itself out that far.

    • Re:Here's my theory. Also, I'm stupid. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the quantum state of a particle is not known until it's observed.

      Quantum computing proposes to exploit this property to make computers that are qualitatively faster than what you can build in a non-quantum world. So it would seem that quantum mechanics is actually more expensive to compute than the "fully rendered" alternative.

      A deeper philosophical question is "do you really need a simulation running to get a universe?" Maybe just laying out the equations is enough, a simulation only queries something which already exists as soon as it is defined.

      Then, you have to wonder, do you really need someone to think of the equation? After all, the mandelbrot set exists even when no one thinks about it.

      So probably the truth is that *everything* exists. Conscious beings are just much more likely to be the byproduct of evolution in a universe with simple rules, than to have been produced from scratch by chance (even though both cases exist). So here we are.

      • Re:Here's my theory. Also, I'm stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06, 2001 @06:05AM (#2664174)
        Then, you have to wonder, do you really need someone to think of the equation? After all, the mandelbrot set exists even when no one thinks about it.

        What you mean is that the Mandelbrot set is something that it's possible for you to think about. That's not the same thing as "exists".

        In other words, what I'm saying is that the Mandelbrot set is a byproduct of your mind.

        From there we can go a lot of different places. If you think your mind is a byproduct of the physical universe, then Mandelbrot sets and indeed all of mathematics exist because of the existence of the universe.

        What is my point? Indeed, I do have one, though it may seem like I don't. My pointis that it's a real possibility that mathematics exists because of the universe. Therefore, applying the mathematical kind of existence to the universe may not be valid. The universe could exist in a different kind of way than mathematical ideas do.

      • Re:Here's my theory. Also, I'm stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

        by stevelinton ( 4044 ) <sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk> on Thursday December 06, 2001 @08:08AM (#2664286) Homepage
        There is an old cartoon, dating from a previous period of uncertainty in particle physics (before the quark theory) showing God adressing a crowd of angles. Caption "OK, they've got up to 1.1GeV. All those in favour of granting them a new particle raise one wing!"
      • Maybe quantum computing will be the point the simulation breaks down. Maybe there's nobody watching it - and we'll just always wonder why it didn't work.

        I know there's one bug in the simulation - there's way too much lint. What's with all the lint?
  • Could someone please link to the English translation of this article? Babelfish didn't seem to recognize many of the words.

  • Broken models: Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Marsh Jedi ( 244205 ) on Thursday December 06, 2001 @05:04AM (#2664086)
    I would be extremely happy if our instrumentation had finally become powerful enough to discover experimental evidence that breaks the model.

    The last huge time someone said, "Hold on--it should not be doing this!" was Planck, in 1900, when he found light quanta in black body radiation.

    Basically, Planck was expecting the color of the light of a hot body to increase smoothly as the temperature went up...(infrared, visible, UV, Xray, gamma)....Unfortunately, he found that in reality, it did _not_ go up smoothly....It went up in a staircase with billions of teeny tiny steps, meaning light is *quantized*. This effed up our entire model. All of it. Before this discovery, the precession of Mercury (ended up being a relativity thing) was the only thing people were having a tough time with. Then this hit and they had to develop a system of mechanics to deal with these quanta.

    Check out the next 15 years:

    1901: Max Planck, determination of Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant, Avogadro's number and the charge on electron

    1904: Albert Einstein, energy-frequency relation of light quanta

    1905: Albert Einstein, special relativity

    1909: Robert Millikan, measured electron charge

    1909: Albert Einstein, particle-wave duality of photons

    1911: Ernest Rutherford, Infers the nucleus from the weird scattering of alpha particles on gold foil

    1913: Niels Bohr, quantum theory of atomic orbits. Same year: radioactivity as nuclear property

    1915: Albert Einstein, general relativity

    Not bad for fifteen years.

    Now, while we have made a lot of progress messing with these basic discoveries in cosmology, particle theory, quantum theory etc, we still have been refining these models. We haven't had to chuck the whole thing in a while.

    I want another fifteen years like this. But for this to happen, the thing needs to break. In half.

    Of course, I have a bias. I want zero point energy, flying cars and FTL travel. So I am praying for rain.

    • Physicists were a little different back then, and had a more intuitive feeling for the science involved. These days, the average physics grad student is screwed if he/she can't model it on a computer. It's a failing that is going to end up hurting physics as a whole in the next 100 years.

  • May as well ask... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SeanBaker ( 13440 )
    Physics intrigues me, but I don't have the time to study it properly. I'd appreciate it, thought, if someone would take the time to correct me here when I suggest something I've wondered since high school physics: Why do we differentiate between mass and energy - is there conclusive proof that they are not, in fact, one in the same, and what we conceive as mass is merely the resistence of the energy (or its generated fields) to change? It seems that if this were our basis, the lack of Higgs boson would not be an issue.
    • IANAP (physicist) but I've taken a bunch of courses.

      Here's something like a partial answer to your question, as best as I can remember from my quantum-physics course.

      Mass and energy are essentially the same thing. The principle difference between energy and matter is the wavelength. Matter has a very short wavelength, whereas energy has a relatively long wavelength.
      Otherwise, matter and energy can be treated as the same thing for most operations.

      But not always.
    • ...is there conclusive proof that they are not, in fact, one in the same, and what we conceive as mass is merely the resistence of the energy (or its generated fields) to change?
      That's a plausible general approach. Unfortunately generalities don't answer specific questions about the mass of particular particles. For example, if you divide the mass of the muon by the mass of the electron, you get a specific value. Why?

      The answer is probably not just "Because that's the way it is." The reason is that the particles seem to have a lot of structure. There are three families of leptons (electron, muon, and tauon). Each of the lepton families has two members, a charged particle and an uncharged neutrino. At the same time, there are three families of quarks, and each quark family also has two members, one of which has 1/3 the electron charge, and the other of which has 2/3 the electron charge. The quarks have a property called 'color charge' and thus are subject to the 'strong force', while the leptons do not have color charge and do not feel the strong force. This page [colorado.edu] has a nice chart of the different families.

      The patterns and symmetries make physicists very suspicious that properties like mass and charge actually arise from a more basic structure, but nobody knows yet. Personally, I'm betting that there *is* a more basic structure that explains the properties of the different particles.

  • This is just plain wrong! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."

    What the hell are you talking about?!
    The Standard Model works just fine with a Higgs boson mass greater than 115 GeV? This lacks even a vague resemblance to a "severe blow"! Heck, the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model extensions -- which tend to predict a "lighter" Higgs mass -- are not even close to ruled out by this fact. (You'd need to get above at least 170 GeV.) The only thing this casts any doubt on is the reports from the ALEPH experiment at CERN that they saw evidence for a Higgs at this energy. Even this last bit is hardly a surprise, since ALEPH had fairly poor statistics.

    Furthermore, yesterday's "solid state" article should not be taken of evidence of anything, save two facts: (A) physicsts, like anyone else, like to bullshit when they're drinking, and (B) some people like talking to journalists a little too much. If you take even a rudimentary look around, you'll see that none of these people who are criticizing reductionism have actually gone so far as to propose a specific theory, a general framework for theoretical model building, or even a couple of half-assed "principles" to guide people in their work. Face it. This is not science. It's just people getting windy.

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