However, if such a GUT exists, then it must not only explain the forces, but also somehow why we see the numbers and kinds of elementary particles we observe in nature. And now things become complicated. As discussed in the last entry on GUTs there maybe a serious issue in how we determine which particles are actually described by such a theory.
To understand how this issue comes about, I need to put together many different things my research partners and I have worked on during the last couple of years. All of these issues are actually put into an expert language in the review of which I talked in the previous entry. It is now finished, and if your interested, you can get it free from here. But it is very technical.
So, let me explain it less technically.
Particle physics is actually superinvolved. If we would like to write down a theory which describes what we see, and only what we see, it would be terribly complicated. It is much more simple to introduce redundancies in the description, so-called gauge symmetries. This makes life much easier, though still not easy. However, the most prominent feature is that we add auxiliary particles to the game. Of course, they cannot be really seen, as they are just auxiliary. Some of them are very obviously unphysical, called therefore ghosts. They can be taken care of comparatively simply. For others, this is less simple.
Now, it turns out that the weak interaction is a very special beast. In this case, there is a unique one-to-one identification between a really observable particle and an auxiliary particle. Thus, it is almost correct to identify both. But this is due to the very special structure of this part of particle physics.
Thus, a natural question is whether, even if it is special, it is justified to do the same for other theories. Well, in some cases, this seems to be the case. But we suspected that this may not be the case in general. And especially not in GUTs.
Now, recently we were going about this much more systematically. You can again access the (very, very technical) result for free here. There, we looked at a very generic class of such GUTs. Well, we actually looked at the most relevant part of them, and still by far not all of them. We also ignored a lot of stuff, e.g. what would become quarks and leptons, and concentrated only on the generalization of the weak interaction and the Higgs.
We then checked, based on our earlier experiences and methods, whether a one-to-one identification of experimentally accessible and auxiliary particles works. And it does essentially never. Visually, this result looks like
On the left, it is seen that everything works nicely with a one-to-one identification in the standard model. On the right, if one-to-one identification would work in a GUT, everything would still be nice. But a our more precise calculation shows that the actually situation, which would be seen in an experiment, is different. There is non one-to-one identification possible. And thus the prediction of the GUT differs from what we already see inn experiments. Thus, a previously good GUT candidate is no longer good.
Though more checks are needed, as always, this is a baffling, and at the same time very discomforting, result.
Baffling as we did originally expect to have problems under very special circumstances. It now appears that actually the standard model of particles is the very special case, and having problems is the standard.
It is discomforting because in the powerful method of perturbation theory the one-to-one identification is essentially always made. As this tool is widely used, this seems to question the validity of many predictions on GUTs. That could have far-reaching consequences. Is this the case? Do we need to forget everything about GUTs we learned so far?
Well, not really, for two reasons. One is that we also showed that methods almost as easily handleable as perturbation theory can be used to fix the problems. This is good, because more powerful methods, like the simulations we used before, are much more cumbersome. However, this leaves us with the problem of having made so far wrong predictions. Well, this we cannot change. But this is just normal scientific progress. You try, you check, you fail, you improve, and then you try again.
And, in fact, this does not mean that GUTs are wrong. Just that we need to consider somewhat different GUTs, and make the predictions more carefully next time. Which GUTs we need to look at we still need to figure out, and that will not be simple. But, fortunately, the improved methods mentioned beforehand can use much of what has been done so far, so most technical results are still unbelievable useful. This will help enormously in finding GUTs which are applicable, and yield a consistent picture, without the one-to-one identification. GUTs are not dead. They likely just need a bit of changing.
This is indeed a dramatic development. But one which fits logically and technically to the improved understanding of the theoretical structures underlying particle physics, which were developed over the last decades. Thus, we are confident that this is just the next logical step in our understanding of how particle physics works.
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