Thursday, February 04, 2010

Higgs boson as an unparticle

The unparticle concept was proposed by Harward professor Howard Gorgi before few years. AWT introduces unparticles by concept of fractally nested density fluctuations inside of dense gas. For example clouds are scale invariant unparticle stuff, similar to Perlin noise. Recently D. Stancato & J. Terning have proposed unparticle character of Higgs bosone. Prof. Hawking reckons, that a number of "partner" particles will emerge, instead, thus making prof. Higgs upset by his stance.

This is not so difficult to understand, because from common perspective the unparticle hypothesis would effectively mean, no distinct Higgs particle signal will be ever found, until we achieve collider jets, composed of unique particles to demonstrate it - because Higgs field interaction would have a character of kink widespread over ultraviolet part of mass-energy spectrum. Could prof. Higgs deserve Nobel price, if it turns out Higgs boson is just some Unhiggs?

In more illustrative way, Unhiggs field is analogous to coat of virtual quarks, in which all elementary particles are surrounded at small distances. This coat glues particles together at smallest distances. Such unstable particles can still be observed by their collective effects, for example by jet suppression during particle collisions. Just because it's difficult to call them particles they're called an unparticles. It's responsible for so called Yukawa coupling, responsible for pairing and gluing of nucleons and quarks inside of atom nuclei, for formation of top-quark pairs, glueballs, pentaquark and another artifacts, which were observed recently at Tevatron.

From Standard model follows, the product of Higgs boson Yukawa coupling to the left- and right-handed top quarks have nearly the same rest mass (173.1±1.3 GeV/c2) like those predicted for Higgs boson (178.0 ± 4.3 GeV/c2). It means, Higgs boson was observed already at Tevatron as a product of top-quark coupling and identified by dilepton channel of top-quark decay.

In AWT such field exists at all scales and it manifests by Casimir force mediated by virtual photons at micrometer scale, or dark matter at megaparsec scale, for example.  It means, Higgs field has a scale invariant character of fuzzy unparticles, which are changing their size accordingly to carrier particles. The combination of trivial and topological band insulators within topological insulators and superconductors is bringing anyons and plektons - unparticles that behave neither according to purely Bose nor Fermi statistics.

The title of recent NewScientist article "In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for" illustrates clearly, physicists are aware of the conceptual problems of Higgs field concept. The article should be interpreted like: "Uhm, well, ... we really don't believe, Higgs boson will be ever found at LHC - so we should concentrate to supersymmetry, for not being blamed completely before publicity". The question is, whether physicists could admit openly before publicity, LHC is useless with respect to search of Higgs boson even by their own theories, if they wasted so much money in it.

This is a demo, how seemingly spontaneous scientific PR is basically working. Dual situation appeared recently in media, when scientists started to speculate, (primordial) gravitational waves cannot be found at all due the "quantum-spread", which renders detectors of gravitational waves useless. With respect to AdS/CFT duality the success or problems with particle search at Planck scale will be replicated/mirrored at cosmological scales (WIMPs detection) and vice-versa.

The similar U-turn we could expect later regarding estimations of LHC collider safety. The most problematic part of Unhiggs detection at LHC is the strangelet controversy: in contact with terresterial matter it could enable avalanche chain formation of clusters of particles, analogous to stable microscopic black holes predicted by Randall-Sundrum model. Recently A. Choptuik demonstrated, when extra-dimensions are involved, black hole could be formed with compare to existing CERN safety analysis, considering Hawking radiation as the only mechanism of black hole evaporation (1, 2, 3). In addittion, CERN considers, black hole could interact with its neighborhood via gravitational interaction only, thus purportedly neglecting their electromagnetic interaction, which is 10e+41 x stronger.

"Does that mean the LHC will make black holes? Not necessarily", Choptuik says. "The Planck energy is a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum. So the only way the LHC might make black holes is if, instead of being three dimensional, space actually has more dimensions that are curled into little loops too small to be detected except in a high-energy particle collision. Predicted by certain theories, those extra dimensions might effectively lower the Planck energy by a huge factor."

Well, if some extra-dimensions could wipe-out one quintillion factor (?!?) of LHC safety expected, can scientists admit, they're openly planning to verify theory, which predicts formation of stable black holes just by formation of black holes at LHC? Could CERN physicists ever admit, it could be qualified as an criminal act by the rest of society?

We should realize, CERN physicists just want to build and operate LHC collider despite of any risk, because it provides them safe and stable jobs and environment for scientific carrier. They're supported in their activities by lobby of private companies involved in technical support of LHC. We could say, high concentration of money in civilization leads to spontaneous formation of dense states of matter in simmilar way, like dense concentration of energy in universe. The desinformed rest of society underestimated these emergent relationships, which resulted into establishing of large groups of people, who are openly ignorant - if not even hostile - to further destiny of civilization.


Zephir said...



Bertrand Russell: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Zephir said...

How incompetent scientists are affecting the public opinion about LHC experiments.

porphyr said...

Great example for the Dunning-Kruger effect!

This zephir in the discussion you are linking to
obviously does not know what what she is talking about, but shows complete self-confidence.

Zephir said...

Bee: "The black hole horizon has no "tension.""

Zephir: Surface tension, hydrophobicity, and black holes: The entropic connection

After all, even the fact, all my posts were deleted illustrates clearly, who is sure by his stance here.

Zephir said...

The ideas Hawking is principally credited with aren't originally his, or experimentally verified. Black hole thermodynamics was started by Jacob Bekenstein who developed the theory two years before Hawking got on board. Hawking got his idea of "Hawking radiation" after visiting Soviet scientists Zeldovich (of Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect fame) and Starobinsky who showed Hawking how rotating black holes must radiate. Hawking generalized the concept slightly to prove even Schwarzschild black holes must radiate. The contributions by Bekenstein or Zeldovich to science are arguably more significant than Hawking's (and at the very least are just as significant) but you will never hear from them making silly predictions about the future in the popular science news. You will never hear reddit start threads that for one of these scientists' birthday (unlike Hawking). You will never see any other scientist go on TV shows claiming that history will remember them as the intellectual equals of Newton and Einstein..

Hawking is simply famous as he has ALS and wrote an unreadable pop science book with a catchy title. He probably deserves to be recognized in any group of top 1000 or so scientists currently alive, but people treat him like he's far and away one of the best living physicists out there.

El Cid said...

The Higgs has nothing to do with an unparticle. The Higgs is a true particle. The Higgs is a boson WTF? Only the envious like Hawking and the clods like you can say such nonsenses. Hawking is a very very smart guy and a better by far physicist than Higgs. But the predictions formulated by Hawking, like the black hole radiation, haven't been verified experimentally, so he can't resist, that someone like Higgs, will recieve the Noble Prize before than him, when the Higgs particle was discovered by the LHC in the next few years.

Zephir said...

The Standard Model does not describe the mass of Higgs boson at all – that's how come there's so much effort been expended to try to resolve this omission. Higgs bosons appear in the minimal supersymmetric extension to the standard model (MSSM). This E8 based theory predicts Higgs mass to be 147.98904797 GeV/c2 (mass of top quark is 173.1±1.3 GeV/c2) Peter Higgs portrait.

Zephir said...

/*..predictions formulated by Hawking, like the black hole radiation..*/
The somewhat ironic point is, if prof. Hawking will be right with his Higgs boson prediction, the he will be wrong with its model of Hawking radiation, because UnHiggs concept introduces extra-dimensions, which would effectively increase the value of Planck constant in many orders of magnitude.

Zephir said...

During time, Higgs boson mass was guessed from 109+-12 GeV to 760+-21 GeV, plus two unconventional theories with 1900 GeV and 10^{18} GeV. There are so many comparably likely models - most of which contain continuous parameters whose values aren't calculable right now - that the whole interval is covered almost uniformly.

El Cid said...

The Higgs boson has a mass of 115 GeV/c^2. What kind of world are you living? Zephir, Zephir, ...

El Cid said...

I'm afraid Prof. Hawking is right in the prediction of the radiation emitted by the black holes but he's wrong in his prediction of the boson the Higgs as an unparticle. Because of his last folly, he's been deposed of his Chair at the University of Cambridge. It's clear that one can't fight against the Higgs mechanism without exasperate to other academic authorities, even this one was Hawking.

Zephir said...

In dense aether theory the only force is the pressure of radiation and the shielding of radiation (supergravity). Many particles are of composite nature, which brings the richness of force interactions into the macroscopic world.

But the elementary particles are too small and fuzzy for to have some internal structure. In this case the shielding force becomes proportional to the size of particle itself, not to size of some even smaller particle inside. Which means, the rest mass of force carrying bosons will depend on the size of shielding particle itself. These bosons can still exist, but they're too different each other.

Zephir said...

Inside the 50-year battle over what to call the Higgs boson

Zephir said...

There must be particles out there smaller than Higgs particle: For me it's surprising, that the Technicolor model, i.e. officially falsified theory still rises some proposals without word of explanation of its previous failure. In theory, electroweak symmetry can be broken without a presence of a narrow spin-0 resonance in the spectrum. Concrete realizations of that idea have long had a hard time to survive the constraints from flavor physics and electroweak precision tests, nevertheless until the last year this was a viable alternative to the Higgs boson. Alas, the observation of the Higgs boson signal at the LHC and Tevatron dealt the last blow to this branch of particle theory.

And the claim and the article really don't correlate very much, the article is about the scheme dependence of renormalization, which he finds to be mild. I have no idea why that would point to "smaller" particles, whatever "smaller" means (technicolor?), so that article just looks very bad.
After all, what does it mean "smaller" in physics? I actually thought it meant "smaller" as in "having a shorter de Broglie wavelength" (i.e. more massive). That said "the Higgs is composite" didn't occur to me as a possible interpretation either.

Zephir said...

Randall Mills predicted mass of Higgs boson to 128.75 GeV