The photon - the particle which makes up light - is probably one of the best known elementary particles. Nonetheless, everything can be made more involved. Thus, we studied a more complicated version of it in our most recent paper.
"Why in the world should we do this?" is a valid question at this point. That proceeded in multiple stages. I have written quite some time ago that for a particle physicist it is baffling that chemistry works. Chemistry works, among other things, because the electric charge of nuclei and electrons are perfectly balanced. Well, as perfect as we can measure, anyhow. In the standard model of particle physics there is no reason why this should be the case. However, the standard model is mathematical consistent only if this is the case. In fact, only if the balance is really perfect. Mathematical consistency is not a sufficient argument why a theory needs to be correct. Experiment is. So people have investigated this baffling fact since decades. In this process, the idea came up that there is a reason for this. And that reason would be that the standard model is only a facet of an underlying theory. This underlying theory enforces the equality of the electric charges by combining the weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces into one force. Such theories are called grand-unified theories, or short GUTs.
Such GUTs use a single gauge theory to combine all these forces. This is only possible with a certain kind, which is fundamentally different from the one we use for electromagnetism alone. It is more similar to the ones of the strong and weak force. We have investigated this type of theories for a long time. And one central insight is that in such theories none of the elementary particles can be observed individually. Only so-called bound states, which are made from two or more elementary particles, can be. That is very different from the ordinary photon of electromagnetism, which is, essentially, elementary.
The central question was therefore whether any such bound state could have the properties of the photon which we know from experiment. Otherwise a GUT would (very likely) not be a possible candidate to explain the balance of electric charges in chemistry. The photon has three important features. It does not carry itself electric charge. It is massless. And it has one unit of so-called spin.
Thus we needed to build a bound state in a GUT with these properties. The spin and absence of charge is actually quite simple, and you get this almost for free in any GUT. It is really the fact that it should not have mass which makes it so complicated. It is even more complicated to verify that it has no mass.
We had some ideas from our previous work, using pen-and-paper calculations, how this could work. There had also been some numerical simulations looking into similar questions in the early 1980ies, though they were, given resources back then, very exploratory. So we set up our own, modern-day numerical simulations. However, it is not yet possible to simulate a full, realistic GUT. For this all computing power on earth would not suffice, if we want to be done in a lifetime. So we used the simplest possible theory which had all the correct features relevant to a true GUT. This is an often employed trick in physics. One reduces a problem to the absolutely essential features, throwing away the rest, which has no or little impact on the particular question at hand. And by this getting a manageable problem.
So we did. And due to some ingenious ideas of my collaborators, especially my PhD student Vincenzo Afferrante, we were able to perform the simulations. There was a lot of frustrating work for the first few months, actually. But we persevered. And we were rewarded. In the end, we got our massless photon in exactly the way we hoped! We thus demonstrated that such a mechanism is possible. We got a massless photon made up out of elementary particles! A huge success for the whole setup. In addition, the things which make up the photon are (partly) very massive. That a bound state can be lighter than its constituents is an amazing consequence of special relativity. For us, this is an added bonus. Because you cannot see the fact that a particle is made up of other particles if you have not enough energy available to create the constituents. Again, this comes from the theory of relativity. In this scenario one of the constituents is indeed so heavy that we would not be able to produce it in experiments yet. Hence, with our current experiments, we would not yet detect that the photon is made up from other particles. And this is indeed what we observe. So everything is consistent. Very reassuring. Unfortunately, it is so heavy that also none of the currently planned experiments would be able to do so. Hence, we will not be able to test this idea directly experimentally. This will need to resort to indirect evidence.
Of course, I gloss over a lot of details and technicalities here, which took most of our time. Describing them would fill multiple entries.
Now, the only thing we need to do is to figure out whether anything we neglected could interfere. None of it will at a qualitative level. But, of course, we have very good experiments. And thus to make the whole idea a suitable GUT to describe nature, we also need to get it quantitatively correct. But this will be a huge step. Therefore we broke it down in small steps. We will do them one by one. Our next step is now to get the electron right. Let's see if this also works out.
Showing posts with label BSM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BSM. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Monday, January 22, 2018
Finding - and curing - disagreements
The topic of grand-unified theories came up in the blog several times, most recently last year in January. To briefly recap, such theories, called GUTs for short, predict that all three forces between elementary particles emerge from a single master force. That would explain a lot of unconnected observations we have in particle physics. For example, why atoms are electrically neutral. The latter we can describe, but not yet explain.
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Can we tell when unification works? - Some answers.
This time, the following is a guest entry by one of my PhD students, Pascal Törek, writing about the most recent results of his research, especially our paper.
Some time ago the editor of this blog, offered me to write about my PhD research here. Since now I gained some insight and collected first results, I think this is the best time to do so.
In a previous blog entry, Axel explained what I am working on and which questions we try to answer. The most important one was: “Does the miracle repeat itself for a unified theory?”. Before I answer this question and explain what is meant by “miracle”, I want to recap some things.
The first thing I want to clarify is, what a unified or a grand unified theory is. The standard model of particle physics describes all the interactions (neglecting gravity) between elementary particles. Those interactions or forces are called strong, weak and electromagnetic force. All these forces or sectors of the standard model describe different kinds of physics. But at very high energies it could be that these three forces are just different parts of one unified force. Of course a theory of a unified force should also be consistent with what has already been measured. What usually comes along in such unified scenarios is that next to the known particles of the standard model, additional particles are predicted. These new particles are typically very heavy and thus makes them very hard to detect in experiments in the near future (if one of those unified theories really describes nature).
What physicists often use to make predictions in an unified theory is perturbation theory. But here comes the hook: what one does in this framework is to do something really arbitrarily, namely to fix a so-called “gauge”. This rather technical term just means that we have to use a mathematical trick to make calculations easier. Or to be more precise, we have to use that trick to even perform a calculation in perturbation theory in those kinds of theories which would be impossible otherwise.
Since nature does not care about this man-made choice, every quantity which could be measured in experiments must be independent of the gauge. But this is exactly how the elementary particles are treated in conventional perturbation theory, they depend on the gauge. An even more peculiar thing is that also the particle spectrum (or the number of particles) predicted by these kinds of theories depends on the gauge.
This problem appears already in the standard model: what we call the Higgs, W, Z, electron, etc. depends on the gauge. This is pretty confusing because those particles have been measured experimentally but should not have been observed like that if you take the theory serious.
This contradiction in the standard model is resolved by a certain mechanism (the so-called “FMS mechanism”) which maps quantities which are independent of the gauge to the gauge-dependent objects. Those gauge-independent quantities are so called bound states. What you essentially do is to “glue” the gauge-dependent objects together in such a way that the result does not depended on the gauge. This exactly the miracle I wrote about in the beginning: one interprets something (gauge-dependent objects as e.g. the Higgs) as if it will be observable and you indeed find this something in experiments. The correct theoretical description is then in terms of bound states and there exists a one-to-one mapping to the gauge-dependent objects. This is the case in the standard model and it seems like a miracle that everything fits so perfectly such that everything works out in the end. The claim is that you see those bound states in experiments and not the gauge-dependent objects.
However, it was not clear if the FMS mechanism works also in a grand unified theory (“Does the miracle repeat itself?”). This is exactly what my research is about. Instead of taking a realistic grand unified theory we decided to take a so called “toy theory”. What is meant by that is that this theory is not a theory which can describe nature but rather covers the most important features of such kind of theory. The reason is simply that I use simulations for answering the question raised above and due to time constraints and the restricted resources a toy model is more feasible than a realistic model. By applying the FMS mechanism to the toy model I found that there is a discrepancy to perturbation theory, which was not the case in the standard model. In principle there were three possible outcomes: the mechanism works in this model and perturbation theory is wrong, the mechanism fails and perturbation theory gives the correct result or both are wrong. So I performed simulations to see which statement is correct and what I found is that only the FMS mechanism predicts the correct result and perturbation theory fails. As a theoretician this result is very pleasing since we like to have nature independent of a arbitrarily chosen gauge.
The question you might ask is: “What is it good for?” Since we know that the standard model is not the theory which can describe everything, we look for theories beyond the standard model as for instance grand unified theories. There are many of these kinds of theories on the market and there is yet no way to check each of them experimentally. What one can do now is to use the FMS mechanism to rule some of them out. This is done by, roughly speaking, applying the mechanism to the theory you want to look at, count the number of particles predicted by the mechanism, compare it to the number particles of the standard model. If there are more the theory is probably a good candidate to study and if not you can throw it away.
Right now Axel, a colleague from Jena University, and myself look at more realistic grand unified theories and try to find general features concerning the FMS mechanism. I am sure Axel or maybe myself keep you updated on this topic.
Some time ago the editor of this blog, offered me to write about my PhD research here. Since now I gained some insight and collected first results, I think this is the best time to do so.
In a previous blog entry, Axel explained what I am working on and which questions we try to answer. The most important one was: “Does the miracle repeat itself for a unified theory?”. Before I answer this question and explain what is meant by “miracle”, I want to recap some things.
The first thing I want to clarify is, what a unified or a grand unified theory is. The standard model of particle physics describes all the interactions (neglecting gravity) between elementary particles. Those interactions or forces are called strong, weak and electromagnetic force. All these forces or sectors of the standard model describe different kinds of physics. But at very high energies it could be that these three forces are just different parts of one unified force. Of course a theory of a unified force should also be consistent with what has already been measured. What usually comes along in such unified scenarios is that next to the known particles of the standard model, additional particles are predicted. These new particles are typically very heavy and thus makes them very hard to detect in experiments in the near future (if one of those unified theories really describes nature).
What physicists often use to make predictions in an unified theory is perturbation theory. But here comes the hook: what one does in this framework is to do something really arbitrarily, namely to fix a so-called “gauge”. This rather technical term just means that we have to use a mathematical trick to make calculations easier. Or to be more precise, we have to use that trick to even perform a calculation in perturbation theory in those kinds of theories which would be impossible otherwise.
Since nature does not care about this man-made choice, every quantity which could be measured in experiments must be independent of the gauge. But this is exactly how the elementary particles are treated in conventional perturbation theory, they depend on the gauge. An even more peculiar thing is that also the particle spectrum (or the number of particles) predicted by these kinds of theories depends on the gauge.
This problem appears already in the standard model: what we call the Higgs, W, Z, electron, etc. depends on the gauge. This is pretty confusing because those particles have been measured experimentally but should not have been observed like that if you take the theory serious.
This contradiction in the standard model is resolved by a certain mechanism (the so-called “FMS mechanism”) which maps quantities which are independent of the gauge to the gauge-dependent objects. Those gauge-independent quantities are so called bound states. What you essentially do is to “glue” the gauge-dependent objects together in such a way that the result does not depended on the gauge. This exactly the miracle I wrote about in the beginning: one interprets something (gauge-dependent objects as e.g. the Higgs) as if it will be observable and you indeed find this something in experiments. The correct theoretical description is then in terms of bound states and there exists a one-to-one mapping to the gauge-dependent objects. This is the case in the standard model and it seems like a miracle that everything fits so perfectly such that everything works out in the end. The claim is that you see those bound states in experiments and not the gauge-dependent objects.
However, it was not clear if the FMS mechanism works also in a grand unified theory (“Does the miracle repeat itself?”). This is exactly what my research is about. Instead of taking a realistic grand unified theory we decided to take a so called “toy theory”. What is meant by that is that this theory is not a theory which can describe nature but rather covers the most important features of such kind of theory. The reason is simply that I use simulations for answering the question raised above and due to time constraints and the restricted resources a toy model is more feasible than a realistic model. By applying the FMS mechanism to the toy model I found that there is a discrepancy to perturbation theory, which was not the case in the standard model. In principle there were three possible outcomes: the mechanism works in this model and perturbation theory is wrong, the mechanism fails and perturbation theory gives the correct result or both are wrong. So I performed simulations to see which statement is correct and what I found is that only the FMS mechanism predicts the correct result and perturbation theory fails. As a theoretician this result is very pleasing since we like to have nature independent of a arbitrarily chosen gauge.
The question you might ask is: “What is it good for?” Since we know that the standard model is not the theory which can describe everything, we look for theories beyond the standard model as for instance grand unified theories. There are many of these kinds of theories on the market and there is yet no way to check each of them experimentally. What one can do now is to use the FMS mechanism to rule some of them out. This is done by, roughly speaking, applying the mechanism to the theory you want to look at, count the number of particles predicted by the mechanism, compare it to the number particles of the standard model. If there are more the theory is probably a good candidate to study and if not you can throw it away.
Right now Axel, a colleague from Jena University, and myself look at more realistic grand unified theories and try to find general features concerning the FMS mechanism. I am sure Axel or maybe myself keep you updated on this topic.
Friday, February 5, 2016
More than one Higgs means more structure
We have published once more a new paper, and I would like again to outline what we did (and why).
The motivation for this investigation started out with another paper of mine. As described earlier, back then I have taken a rather formal stand on proposals for new physics. It was based on the idea that there is some kind of self-similar substructure of what we usually call the Higgs and the W and Z bosons. In this paper, I speculated that this self-similarity may be rather exclusive to the standard model. As a consequence, this may alter the predictions for new physics models.
Of course, speculating is easy. To make something out of it requires to do real calculations. Thus, I have started two projects to test them. One is on the unification of forces, and still ongoing. Some first results are there, but not yet anything conclusive. It is the second project which yielded new results.
In this second project we had a look at a theory where more Higgs particles are added to the standard model, a so-called 2-Higgs-doublet model, or 2HDM for short. I had speculated that, besides the additional Higgs particles, further additional particles may arise as bound states. I. e., as states which are made from two or more other particles. These are not accounted for by ordinary methods.
In the end, it now appears that this idea is not correct, at least not in its simplest form. There are still some very special cases left, where this may still be true, but by and large not. However, we have understood why the original idea is wrong, and why it may still be correct in other cases. The answer is symmetry.
When adding additional Higgs particles, one is not entirely free. It is necessary that we do not alter the standard model where we have already tested it. Especially, we cannot easily modify the symmetries of the standard model. However, the symmetries of the standard model then induce a remarkable effect. The additional Higgs particles in 2HDMs are not entirely different from the ones we know. Rather, they mix with it as a quantum effect. In quantum theories, particles can change into each other under certain conditions. And the symmetries of the standard model entail that this is possible for the new and the old Higgses.
If the particles mix, the possibilities to distinguish them diminish. As a consequence, the simplest additional states can no longer be distinguished from the states already accounted for by ordinary methods. Thus, they are not additional states. Hence, the simplest possible deviation I speculated about is not realized. There may still be more complicated ones, but to figure this out is much more complicated, and has yet to be done. Thus, this work showed that the simple idea was not right.
So what about the other project still in progress? Should I now also expect this to just reproduce what is known? Actually no. The thing we learned in this project was why everything fell into its ordinary places. The reason is the mixing between the normal and the additional Higgs particles. This possibility is precluded in the other project, as there the additional particles are very different from the original ones. It may still be that my original idea is wrong. But it has to be wrong in a different way than in the case we investigated now. And thus we have also learned something more about a wider class of theories.
This shows that even disproving your ideas is important. From the reasons why they fail you learn more than just from a confirmation of them - you learn something new.
The motivation for this investigation started out with another paper of mine. As described earlier, back then I have taken a rather formal stand on proposals for new physics. It was based on the idea that there is some kind of self-similar substructure of what we usually call the Higgs and the W and Z bosons. In this paper, I speculated that this self-similarity may be rather exclusive to the standard model. As a consequence, this may alter the predictions for new physics models.
Of course, speculating is easy. To make something out of it requires to do real calculations. Thus, I have started two projects to test them. One is on the unification of forces, and still ongoing. Some first results are there, but not yet anything conclusive. It is the second project which yielded new results.
In this second project we had a look at a theory where more Higgs particles are added to the standard model, a so-called 2-Higgs-doublet model, or 2HDM for short. I had speculated that, besides the additional Higgs particles, further additional particles may arise as bound states. I. e., as states which are made from two or more other particles. These are not accounted for by ordinary methods.
In the end, it now appears that this idea is not correct, at least not in its simplest form. There are still some very special cases left, where this may still be true, but by and large not. However, we have understood why the original idea is wrong, and why it may still be correct in other cases. The answer is symmetry.
When adding additional Higgs particles, one is not entirely free. It is necessary that we do not alter the standard model where we have already tested it. Especially, we cannot easily modify the symmetries of the standard model. However, the symmetries of the standard model then induce a remarkable effect. The additional Higgs particles in 2HDMs are not entirely different from the ones we know. Rather, they mix with it as a quantum effect. In quantum theories, particles can change into each other under certain conditions. And the symmetries of the standard model entail that this is possible for the new and the old Higgses.
If the particles mix, the possibilities to distinguish them diminish. As a consequence, the simplest additional states can no longer be distinguished from the states already accounted for by ordinary methods. Thus, they are not additional states. Hence, the simplest possible deviation I speculated about is not realized. There may still be more complicated ones, but to figure this out is much more complicated, and has yet to be done. Thus, this work showed that the simple idea was not right.
So what about the other project still in progress? Should I now also expect this to just reproduce what is known? Actually no. The thing we learned in this project was why everything fell into its ordinary places. The reason is the mixing between the normal and the additional Higgs particles. This possibility is precluded in the other project, as there the additional particles are very different from the original ones. It may still be that my original idea is wrong. But it has to be wrong in a different way than in the case we investigated now. And thus we have also learned something more about a wider class of theories.
This shows that even disproving your ideas is important. From the reasons why they fail you learn more than just from a confirmation of them - you learn something new.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Something dark on the move
If you browse either through popular science physics or through the most recent publications on the particle physics' preprint server arxiv.org then there is one topic which you cannot miss: Dark matter.
What is dark matter? Well, we do not know. So why do we care? Because we know something is out there, something dark, and its moving. Or, more precisely, it moves stuff around. When we look to the skies and measure how stars and galaxies move, then we find something interesting. We think we know how these objects interact, and how they therefore influence each other's movement. But what we observe does not agree with our expectations. We think we have excluded any possibility that we are overlooking something known, like that there are many more black holes, intergalactic gas and dust, or any of the other particles we know filling up the cosmos. No, it seems there is more out there than we can detect right now directly and have a theory for.
Of course, it can be that we miss something about how stars and galaxies influence each other, and this possibility is also pursued. But actually the simplest explanation is that out there is a new type of matter. A type of matter which does not interact either by electromagnetism or the strong force, because otherwise we would have seen it in experiment. Since there is no interaction with electromagnetism, it does not reflect or emit light, and therefore we cannot see it using optics. Hence the name dark matter. Because it is dark.
It certainly acts gravitationally, since this is how stars and galaxies are influenced. It may still be that it either interacts by the weak interaction or with the Higgs. That is something which is currently investigated in many experiments around the world. Of course, it could also interact with the standard model particles by some unknown force we have yet to discover. This would make it even more mysterious.
Because it is so popular there are many resources on the web which discuss what we already know (or do not know) about dark matter. Rather than repeating that, I will here write why I start to be interested in it. Or at least in some possible types of it. Because dark matter which only interacts by gravitation is not particularly interesting right know, as we will likely not learn much about in the foreseeable future. So I am more interested in such types of dark matter which couple by some other means to the standard model. Until they are excluded by experiments.
If it should interact with the standard model by some new force then this new force will look likely at first just like a modification of the weak interactions and/or of the Higgs. This would be an effective description of it. Given time, we would also figure out the details, but we have not yet.
Thus, as a first shot, I will concentrate on the cases where it it could interact with the weak force or just with the Higgs. Interacting with the weak force is actually quite complicated if it should fulfill all experimental constraints we have. Modifications there, though possible, are thus unlikely. Leaves the Higgs.
Therefore, I would like to see how dark matter could interact with the Higgs. Such models are called Higgs portal models, because the Higgs act as the portal through which we see dark matter. So far, this is also pretty standard.
Now comes the new thing. I have written several times that I work on questions what the Higgs really is. That it could have an interesting self-similar structure. And here is the big deal for me: The presence of dark matter interacting with the Higgs could influence actually this structure. This is similar to what happens with other bound states: The constituents can change their identity, as we investigate in another project.
My aim is now to bring all these three things together: Dark matter, Higgs, and the structure of the Higgs. I want to know whether such a type of dark matter influences the structure of the Higgs, and if yes how. And whether this could have a measurable influence. The other way around is that I would like to know whether the Higgs influences the dark matter in some way. Combining these three things is a rather new idea, and it will be very fascinating to explore it. The best course of action will be to do this by simulating the Higgs together with dark matter. This will be neither simple nor cheap, so this may take a lot of time. I will keep you posted.
What is dark matter? Well, we do not know. So why do we care? Because we know something is out there, something dark, and its moving. Or, more precisely, it moves stuff around. When we look to the skies and measure how stars and galaxies move, then we find something interesting. We think we know how these objects interact, and how they therefore influence each other's movement. But what we observe does not agree with our expectations. We think we have excluded any possibility that we are overlooking something known, like that there are many more black holes, intergalactic gas and dust, or any of the other particles we know filling up the cosmos. No, it seems there is more out there than we can detect right now directly and have a theory for.
Of course, it can be that we miss something about how stars and galaxies influence each other, and this possibility is also pursued. But actually the simplest explanation is that out there is a new type of matter. A type of matter which does not interact either by electromagnetism or the strong force, because otherwise we would have seen it in experiment. Since there is no interaction with electromagnetism, it does not reflect or emit light, and therefore we cannot see it using optics. Hence the name dark matter. Because it is dark.
It certainly acts gravitationally, since this is how stars and galaxies are influenced. It may still be that it either interacts by the weak interaction or with the Higgs. That is something which is currently investigated in many experiments around the world. Of course, it could also interact with the standard model particles by some unknown force we have yet to discover. This would make it even more mysterious.
Because it is so popular there are many resources on the web which discuss what we already know (or do not know) about dark matter. Rather than repeating that, I will here write why I start to be interested in it. Or at least in some possible types of it. Because dark matter which only interacts by gravitation is not particularly interesting right know, as we will likely not learn much about in the foreseeable future. So I am more interested in such types of dark matter which couple by some other means to the standard model. Until they are excluded by experiments.
If it should interact with the standard model by some new force then this new force will look likely at first just like a modification of the weak interactions and/or of the Higgs. This would be an effective description of it. Given time, we would also figure out the details, but we have not yet.
Thus, as a first shot, I will concentrate on the cases where it it could interact with the weak force or just with the Higgs. Interacting with the weak force is actually quite complicated if it should fulfill all experimental constraints we have. Modifications there, though possible, are thus unlikely. Leaves the Higgs.
Therefore, I would like to see how dark matter could interact with the Higgs. Such models are called Higgs portal models, because the Higgs act as the portal through which we see dark matter. So far, this is also pretty standard.
Now comes the new thing. I have written several times that I work on questions what the Higgs really is. That it could have an interesting self-similar structure. And here is the big deal for me: The presence of dark matter interacting with the Higgs could influence actually this structure. This is similar to what happens with other bound states: The constituents can change their identity, as we investigate in another project.
My aim is now to bring all these three things together: Dark matter, Higgs, and the structure of the Higgs. I want to know whether such a type of dark matter influences the structure of the Higgs, and if yes how. And whether this could have a measurable influence. The other way around is that I would like to know whether the Higgs influences the dark matter in some way. Combining these three things is a rather new idea, and it will be very fascinating to explore it. The best course of action will be to do this by simulating the Higgs together with dark matter. This will be neither simple nor cheap, so this may take a lot of time. I will keep you posted.
Monday, April 13, 2015
A partner for every particle?
A master student has started with me a thesis on a new topic, one on which I have not been working before. Therefore, before going into details about the thesis' topic itself, I would like to introduce the basic physics underlying it.
The topic is the rather famous concept of supersymmetry. What this means I will explain in a minute. Supersymmetry is related to two general topics we are working on. One is the quest for what comes after the standard model. It is with this respect that it has become famous. There are many quite excellent introductions to why it is relevant, and why it could be within the LHC's reach to discover it. I will not just point to any of these, but write nonetheless here a new text on it. Why? Because of the relation to the second research area involved in the master thesis, the ground work about theory. This gives our investigation a quite different perspective on the topic, and requires a different kind of introduction.
So what is supersymmetry all about? I have written about the fact that there are two very different types of particles we know of: Bosons and fermions. Both types have very distinct features. Any particle we know belong to either of these two types. E.g. the famous Higgs is a boson, while the electron is a fermion.
One question to pose is, whether these two categories are really distinct, or if there are just two sides of a single coin. Supersymmetry is what you get if you try to realize the latter option. Supersymmetry - or SUSY for short - introduces a relation between bosons and fermions. A consequence of SUSY is that for every boson there is a fermion partner, and for every fermion there is a boson partner.
A quick counting in the standard model shows that it cannot be supersymmetric. Moreover, SUSY also dictates that all other properties of a boson and a fermion partner must be the same. This includes the mass and the electric charge. Hence, if SUSY would be real, there should be a boson which acts otherwise like an electron. Experiments tell us that this is not the case. So is SUSY doomed? Well, not necessarily. There is a weaker version of SUSY where it only approximately true - a so-called broken symmetry. This allows to make the partners differently massive, and then they can escape detection. For now.
SUSY, even in its approximate form, has many neat features. It is therefore a possibility desired by many to be true. But only experiment (and nature) will tell eventually.
But the reason why we are interested in SUSY is quite different.
As you see, SUSY puts tight constraints on what kind of particles are in a theory. But it does even more. It also restricts the way how these particles can interact. The constraints on the interactions are a little bit more flexible than on the kind of particles. You can realize different amounts of SUSY by relaxing or enforcing relations between the interactions. What does 'more or less' SUSY mean? The details are somewhat subtle, but a hand-waving statement is that more SUSY not only relates bosons and fermions, but in addition also partner particles of different particles more and more. There is an ultimate limit to the amount of SUSY you can have, essentially when everything and everyone is related and every interaction is essentially of the same strength. That is what is called a maximal SUSY theory. A fancy name is N=4 SUSY for technical reason, if you should come across it somewhere on the web.
And it is this theory which is interesting to us. Having such very tight constraints enforces a very predetermined behavior. Many things are fixed. Thus, calculations are more simple. At the same time, many of there more subtle questions we are working on are nonetheless still there. Using the additional constraints, we hope to understand this stuff better. With these insights, we may have a better chance to understand the same stuff in a less rigid theory, like the standard model.
The topic is the rather famous concept of supersymmetry. What this means I will explain in a minute. Supersymmetry is related to two general topics we are working on. One is the quest for what comes after the standard model. It is with this respect that it has become famous. There are many quite excellent introductions to why it is relevant, and why it could be within the LHC's reach to discover it. I will not just point to any of these, but write nonetheless here a new text on it. Why? Because of the relation to the second research area involved in the master thesis, the ground work about theory. This gives our investigation a quite different perspective on the topic, and requires a different kind of introduction.
So what is supersymmetry all about? I have written about the fact that there are two very different types of particles we know of: Bosons and fermions. Both types have very distinct features. Any particle we know belong to either of these two types. E.g. the famous Higgs is a boson, while the electron is a fermion.
One question to pose is, whether these two categories are really distinct, or if there are just two sides of a single coin. Supersymmetry is what you get if you try to realize the latter option. Supersymmetry - or SUSY for short - introduces a relation between bosons and fermions. A consequence of SUSY is that for every boson there is a fermion partner, and for every fermion there is a boson partner.
A quick counting in the standard model shows that it cannot be supersymmetric. Moreover, SUSY also dictates that all other properties of a boson and a fermion partner must be the same. This includes the mass and the electric charge. Hence, if SUSY would be real, there should be a boson which acts otherwise like an electron. Experiments tell us that this is not the case. So is SUSY doomed? Well, not necessarily. There is a weaker version of SUSY where it only approximately true - a so-called broken symmetry. This allows to make the partners differently massive, and then they can escape detection. For now.
SUSY, even in its approximate form, has many neat features. It is therefore a possibility desired by many to be true. But only experiment (and nature) will tell eventually.
But the reason why we are interested in SUSY is quite different.
As you see, SUSY puts tight constraints on what kind of particles are in a theory. But it does even more. It also restricts the way how these particles can interact. The constraints on the interactions are a little bit more flexible than on the kind of particles. You can realize different amounts of SUSY by relaxing or enforcing relations between the interactions. What does 'more or less' SUSY mean? The details are somewhat subtle, but a hand-waving statement is that more SUSY not only relates bosons and fermions, but in addition also partner particles of different particles more and more. There is an ultimate limit to the amount of SUSY you can have, essentially when everything and everyone is related and every interaction is essentially of the same strength. That is what is called a maximal SUSY theory. A fancy name is N=4 SUSY for technical reason, if you should come across it somewhere on the web.
And it is this theory which is interesting to us. Having such very tight constraints enforces a very predetermined behavior. Many things are fixed. Thus, calculations are more simple. At the same time, many of there more subtle questions we are working on are nonetheless still there. Using the additional constraints, we hope to understand this stuff better. With these insights, we may have a better chance to understand the same stuff in a less rigid theory, like the standard model.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Can we tell when unification works?
Some time ago, I wrote about the idea that the three forces of the standard model, the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force, could all be just different parts of one unified force. In the group I am building I have now a PhD student working on such a theory, using simulations.
Together, we would like to answer a number of questions. The most important one is, whether such a theory is consistent with what we see around us. That is necessary to make such a theory relevant.
Now, there is almost an infinite number of versions of such unified theories. We could never hope to check each and every one of them. We could pick one. But hoping it would be the right one is somewhat too optimistic. We therefore take a different approach. We aim to get a general criterion such that we can check out many of the candidate theories at the same time.
For this reason, we ignore for the moment that we would like to reproduce experiments. Rather, we ask ourselves what are common traits of these theories. We have done that. What we are currently doing is to construct the simplest possible theory which has as many of these traits as possible. We have almost completed that. This reduced theory will become indeed very simple. Of known physics, it contains the weak force and the Higgs. As with every unified theory, it also contains a number of additional particles. But they are not dangerous, if they will be too heavy to be visible to us. At least, as long as we do not have more powerful experiments. The last ingredient are the interactions between the different particles. That is what we are working on now. Having the simplest possible theory has also another benefit - it demands small enough computer resources to be manageable.
After fixing the theory, how do the questions look like? One of the traits of such theories is that there are many new particles. What is there fate? How is it arranged that we cannot see them? If we think of the theory describing only rather small changes to the standard model, we can use perturbation theory. With this, we would just follow pretty old footsteps, and the answer can essentially be guessed form the experience of other people. The answer will be that all the surplus stuff is indeed very, very heavy. In fact, so heavy that our experiments will not be able to see it in any foreseeable future, except as very indirect effects. We get out what we put in.
But here comes the new stuff. As I have described earlier, there are many subtleties when it comes to the Higgs of the standard model. But in the end, everything collapses to a rather simple picture. Almost a miracle. Almost, but not quite. The reason is the structure of the standard model, which is very special in the number and properties of particles. The other one is that the parameters, things like masses, just fits.
The natural question is hence: Does the miracle repeats itself for this type of unified theory? Is the new stuff really heavy? Is the known stuff light enough? If the almost-miracle repeats itself, the answer is yes. Should it repeat itself? Well, we will test under which conditions it repeats itself, by playing around both with the number of particles, their structures, and the parameters. We assume right now that we can get it to work, but that we can also break it. And we would like to understand very precisely when it breaks and why it breaks. And finally, the most obvious question, do we want that it repeats itself? Probably the most obvious question, arguably the hardest to answer. If it does not repeat itself, a whole class of ideas becomes more problematic. Ideas, which are conceptually pretty attractive. So, in principle, we would like to see it repeating itself. But then, would it not be more interesting if we needed to start afresh? Probably also true. But in the end, our preference should not play a role. After all, nature decides, and we are just the spectators, trying to figuring out what goes on. And our preferences have nothing to do with it, and therefore we should keep them out of the game.
Together, we would like to answer a number of questions. The most important one is, whether such a theory is consistent with what we see around us. That is necessary to make such a theory relevant.
Now, there is almost an infinite number of versions of such unified theories. We could never hope to check each and every one of them. We could pick one. But hoping it would be the right one is somewhat too optimistic. We therefore take a different approach. We aim to get a general criterion such that we can check out many of the candidate theories at the same time.
For this reason, we ignore for the moment that we would like to reproduce experiments. Rather, we ask ourselves what are common traits of these theories. We have done that. What we are currently doing is to construct the simplest possible theory which has as many of these traits as possible. We have almost completed that. This reduced theory will become indeed very simple. Of known physics, it contains the weak force and the Higgs. As with every unified theory, it also contains a number of additional particles. But they are not dangerous, if they will be too heavy to be visible to us. At least, as long as we do not have more powerful experiments. The last ingredient are the interactions between the different particles. That is what we are working on now. Having the simplest possible theory has also another benefit - it demands small enough computer resources to be manageable.
After fixing the theory, how do the questions look like? One of the traits of such theories is that there are many new particles. What is there fate? How is it arranged that we cannot see them? If we think of the theory describing only rather small changes to the standard model, we can use perturbation theory. With this, we would just follow pretty old footsteps, and the answer can essentially be guessed form the experience of other people. The answer will be that all the surplus stuff is indeed very, very heavy. In fact, so heavy that our experiments will not be able to see it in any foreseeable future, except as very indirect effects. We get out what we put in.
But here comes the new stuff. As I have described earlier, there are many subtleties when it comes to the Higgs of the standard model. But in the end, everything collapses to a rather simple picture. Almost a miracle. Almost, but not quite. The reason is the structure of the standard model, which is very special in the number and properties of particles. The other one is that the parameters, things like masses, just fits.
The natural question is hence: Does the miracle repeats itself for this type of unified theory? Is the new stuff really heavy? Is the known stuff light enough? If the almost-miracle repeats itself, the answer is yes. Should it repeat itself? Well, we will test under which conditions it repeats itself, by playing around both with the number of particles, their structures, and the parameters. We assume right now that we can get it to work, but that we can also break it. And we would like to understand very precisely when it breaks and why it breaks. And finally, the most obvious question, do we want that it repeats itself? Probably the most obvious question, arguably the hardest to answer. If it does not repeat itself, a whole class of ideas becomes more problematic. Ideas, which are conceptually pretty attractive. So, in principle, we would like to see it repeating itself. But then, would it not be more interesting if we needed to start afresh? Probably also true. But in the end, our preference should not play a role. After all, nature decides, and we are just the spectators, trying to figuring out what goes on. And our preferences have nothing to do with it, and therefore we should keep them out of the game.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Take your theory seriously
I have published a new paper. This paper has a somewhat simple message, even if it is technical. This message is just: Take your theory seriously. This may seem obvious, but it is not necessarily so. The reason is that if a theory works spectacularly well, if you do not take it serious, why should you care? And if I mean spectacular, I mean an agreement with experimenter where any deviations are smaller than any background noise we could not yet eliminate. The theory which works so well is, of course, the standard model.
The paper is a follow-up of the proceeding I have discussed last year. The upshot of this proceeding is that we use perturbation theory to describe the physics we measure, e.g., at the LHC at CERN. However, perturbation theory is not taking the theory too seriously, but it works so very well. The reason for this can be understood: It is an almost miraculous coincidence that taking the theory seriously gives almost the same results. We have checked this in very great detail.
But understanding what is going on in the standard model is one thing. One of the big aims in modern particle physics is to understand what else there could be.
Now, comfortable with the success within the standard model, we have for a very long time assumed that taking the candidate theories for new physics also not seriously should work out. Of course, there have been some exceptions, where we knew it should not work. But by and large, the success with the standard model made us comfortable with using the same techniques.
In the proceeding, I already raised some doubt whether this would be justified when there should be a second Higgs. Under certain conditions, this may not be correct. In the full paper I now extend these doubts also to other theories, and even conclude it may be necessary to rethink even the cases where we thought we were careful.
What is the reason behind this departure? Why should it not work? Well, I do not state that it will not work, just that it might not work. In the standard model, we were in the comfortable situation that experiments told us that it does work. Now, in the absence of experimental results, we are left to theory to tell us where to look. So we do not know whether taking the theory not seriously works out, and may be misguided if it does not.
But why should it fail this time, when it works so well for the standard model? A legitimate question. It requires to understand why it does work for the standard model. Looking at it in detail shows that it requires two conditions to work. One is that the relative masses of the particles lie within a certain range. That is satisfied by the standard model. The second is that the relative number of particles is just right. Both conditions are or may not be met by the theories we have for new physics. In the paper, I give particular examples for several theories, and formulate requirements which have to be met for things to work out.
So is the paper now killing of models? No. At least not yet. I only formulate conditions and requirements. Whether a particular theory meets these is a question to the theory. I give some examples where the situation is very much on the borderline to have a starting point where to check. But what actually happens requires a calculation. A calculation in which we do take the theory very seriously. This will be very complicated, and in the end we may just figure out that it was unnecessary. But then we can be sure to be right, and the theory gives us the leeway to not take it too seriously. And being sure is a basic requirement when one ones to explain the unknown.
The paper is a follow-up of the proceeding I have discussed last year. The upshot of this proceeding is that we use perturbation theory to describe the physics we measure, e.g., at the LHC at CERN. However, perturbation theory is not taking the theory too seriously, but it works so very well. The reason for this can be understood: It is an almost miraculous coincidence that taking the theory seriously gives almost the same results. We have checked this in very great detail.
But understanding what is going on in the standard model is one thing. One of the big aims in modern particle physics is to understand what else there could be.
Now, comfortable with the success within the standard model, we have for a very long time assumed that taking the candidate theories for new physics also not seriously should work out. Of course, there have been some exceptions, where we knew it should not work. But by and large, the success with the standard model made us comfortable with using the same techniques.
In the proceeding, I already raised some doubt whether this would be justified when there should be a second Higgs. Under certain conditions, this may not be correct. In the full paper I now extend these doubts also to other theories, and even conclude it may be necessary to rethink even the cases where we thought we were careful.
What is the reason behind this departure? Why should it not work? Well, I do not state that it will not work, just that it might not work. In the standard model, we were in the comfortable situation that experiments told us that it does work. Now, in the absence of experimental results, we are left to theory to tell us where to look. So we do not know whether taking the theory not seriously works out, and may be misguided if it does not.
But why should it fail this time, when it works so well for the standard model? A legitimate question. It requires to understand why it does work for the standard model. Looking at it in detail shows that it requires two conditions to work. One is that the relative masses of the particles lie within a certain range. That is satisfied by the standard model. The second is that the relative number of particles is just right. Both conditions are or may not be met by the theories we have for new physics. In the paper, I give particular examples for several theories, and formulate requirements which have to be met for things to work out.
So is the paper now killing of models? No. At least not yet. I only formulate conditions and requirements. Whether a particular theory meets these is a question to the theory. I give some examples where the situation is very much on the borderline to have a starting point where to check. But what actually happens requires a calculation. A calculation in which we do take the theory very seriously. This will be very complicated, and in the end we may just figure out that it was unnecessary. But then we can be sure to be right, and the theory gives us the leeway to not take it too seriously. And being sure is a basic requirement when one ones to explain the unknown.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Challenging subtleties
I have just published a conference proceeding in which I return to an idea of how the standard model of particle physics could be extended. It is an idea I have already briefly written about: The idea is concerned with the question what would happen if there would be twice as many Higgs particles as there are in nature. The model describing this idea is therefore called 2-Higgs(-doublet)-model, or for short 2HDM. The word doublet in the official name is rather technical. It has something to do with how the second Higgs connects to the weak interaction.
As fascinating as the model itself may be, I do not want to write about its general properties. Given its popularity, you will find many things about it already on the web. No, here I want to write about what I want to learn about this theory in particular. And this is a peculiar subtlety. It connects to the research I am doing on the situation with just the single Higgs.
To understand what is going on, I have to dig deep into the theory stuff, but I will try to keep it not too technical.
The basic question is: What can we observe, and what can we not observe. One of the things a theoretician learns early on that it may be quite helpful to have some dummies. This means that he adds something in a calculation just for the sake of making the calculation simpler. Of course, she or he has to make very sure that this is not affecting the result. But if done properly, this can be of great help. The technical term for this trick is an auxiliary quantity.
Now, when we talk about the weak interactions, something amazing happens. If we assume that everything is indeed very weak, we can calculate results using so-called perturbation theory. And now an amazing thing happens: It appears, like the auxiliary quantities are real, and we can observe them. It is, and can only be, some kind of illusion. This is indeed true, something I have been working on since a long time, and others before me. It just comes out that the true thing and the auxiliary quantities have the same properties, and therefore it does not matter, which we take for our calculation. This is far from obvious, and pretty hard to explain without very much technical stuff. But since this is not the point I would like to make in this entry, let me skip these details.
That this is the case is actually a consequence of a number of 'lucky' coincidences in the standard model. Some particles have just the right mass. Some particles appear just in the right ratio of numbers. Some particles are just inert enough. Of course, as a theoretician, my experience is that there is no such thing as 'lucky'. But that is a different story (I know, I say this quite often this time).
Now, I finally return to the starting point: The 2HDM. In this theory, one can do the same kind of tricks with auxiliary quantities and perturbation theory and so on. If you assume that everything is just like in the standard model, this is fine. But is this really so? In the proceedings, I look at this question. Especially, I check whether perturbation theory should work. And what I find is: This may be possible, but it is very unlikely to happen in all the circumstances where one would like this to be true. Especially, in several scenarios in which one would like to have this property, it could indeed be failing. E.g., in some scenarios this theory could have twice as many weak gauge bosons, so-called W and Z bosons, as we see in experiment. That would be bad, as this would contradict experiment, and therefore invalidate these scenarios.
This is not the final word, of course not - proceedings are just status reports, not final answers. But that there may be, just may be, a difference. This is enough to require us (and, in this case, me) to make sure what is going on. That will be challenging. But this time such a subtly may make a huge difference.
As fascinating as the model itself may be, I do not want to write about its general properties. Given its popularity, you will find many things about it already on the web. No, here I want to write about what I want to learn about this theory in particular. And this is a peculiar subtlety. It connects to the research I am doing on the situation with just the single Higgs.
To understand what is going on, I have to dig deep into the theory stuff, but I will try to keep it not too technical.
The basic question is: What can we observe, and what can we not observe. One of the things a theoretician learns early on that it may be quite helpful to have some dummies. This means that he adds something in a calculation just for the sake of making the calculation simpler. Of course, she or he has to make very sure that this is not affecting the result. But if done properly, this can be of great help. The technical term for this trick is an auxiliary quantity.
Now, when we talk about the weak interactions, something amazing happens. If we assume that everything is indeed very weak, we can calculate results using so-called perturbation theory. And now an amazing thing happens: It appears, like the auxiliary quantities are real, and we can observe them. It is, and can only be, some kind of illusion. This is indeed true, something I have been working on since a long time, and others before me. It just comes out that the true thing and the auxiliary quantities have the same properties, and therefore it does not matter, which we take for our calculation. This is far from obvious, and pretty hard to explain without very much technical stuff. But since this is not the point I would like to make in this entry, let me skip these details.
That this is the case is actually a consequence of a number of 'lucky' coincidences in the standard model. Some particles have just the right mass. Some particles appear just in the right ratio of numbers. Some particles are just inert enough. Of course, as a theoretician, my experience is that there is no such thing as 'lucky'. But that is a different story (I know, I say this quite often this time).
Now, I finally return to the starting point: The 2HDM. In this theory, one can do the same kind of tricks with auxiliary quantities and perturbation theory and so on. If you assume that everything is just like in the standard model, this is fine. But is this really so? In the proceedings, I look at this question. Especially, I check whether perturbation theory should work. And what I find is: This may be possible, but it is very unlikely to happen in all the circumstances where one would like this to be true. Especially, in several scenarios in which one would like to have this property, it could indeed be failing. E.g., in some scenarios this theory could have twice as many weak gauge bosons, so-called W and Z bosons, as we see in experiment. That would be bad, as this would contradict experiment, and therefore invalidate these scenarios.
This is not the final word, of course not - proceedings are just status reports, not final answers. But that there may be, just may be, a difference. This is enough to require us (and, in this case, me) to make sure what is going on. That will be challenging. But this time such a subtly may make a huge difference.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Why continue into the beyond?
I have just returned from a very excellent 37th International Conference on High-Energy Physics. However, as splendid as the event itself was, it was in a sense bad news: No results which hint at anything substantial beyond the standard model, except for the usual suspect statistical fluctuations. This does not mean that there is nothing - we know there is more for many reasons. But in an increasingly frustrating sequence of years all our observational and experimental results keep pushing it beyond our reach. Even for me as a theorist there is just not enough substantial information to be able to do more than just vague speculation of what could be.
Nonetheless, I just wrote that I want to venture into this unknown beyond, and in force. Hence it is reasonable - in fact necessary - to pose the question: Why? If I do not know and have too little information, is there any chance to hit the right answer? The answer to this: Probably not. But...
Actually, there are two buts. One is simply curiosity. I am a theorist, and I can always pose the question how does something work, even without having a special application or situation in mind. Though this may just end up as nothing, it would not be the first time that the answer to a question has been discovered long before the question. In fact, the single most important building block of the standard-model, so-called Yang-Mills theory, has been discovered by theorists almost a decade before it was recognized to be the key to explain the experimental results.
But this is not the main reason for me to venture into this direction. The main reason has to do with the experience I made with Higgs physics - that despite appearance there is often a second layer to the theory. Such a second layer has in this case shifted the perception of how things we describe in theory correlate with the things we see in experiment. Since many proposed theories beyond the standard model, especially such as have caught my interest, are extensions of the Higgs of the standard model. It thus stands to reason that similar statements hold true in their cases. However, whether they hold true, and how they work cannot be fathomed without looking at theses theories. And that is what I want to do.
Why should one do this? Such subtle questions seem to be at first not really related to experiment. But understanding how a theory really works should also give us a better idea of what kind of observations such a theory can actually deliver. And now it becomes very interesting for an experiment. Since we do at the current time not know what to expect, we need to think about what we could expect. This is especially important as to look in every corner requires much more resources than available to us in the foreseeable future. Hence, any insights into what kind of experimental results a theory can yield is very important to select where to focus.
Of course, my research alone will not be sufficient to do this. Since it easily can be that I am looking at the 'wrong' theory, it would not be a good idea to put too much effort in it. But, when there are many theoreticians working on many theories, and many theories all say that it is a good idea to look into a particular direction: Then we have a guidance for where to look. Then there seems to be something special in this direction. And if not, then we have excluded a lot of theories in one go.
As one person in a discussion session (I could not figure out who precisely) has put it aptly at the conference: "The time of guaranteed discoveries is over.". This means that now that we have all pieces of the standard model, we cannot expect to find a new piece any time soon. All our indirect results even tell us that the next piece will be much harder to find. Hence, we are facing a situation as was last seen in physics in the second half of the 19th century and beginning 20th century: There are only some hints that something does not fit. And now we have to go looking, without knowing in advance how far we will have to walk. Or in which direction. This is probably more of an adventure than the last decades, where things where essentially happening on schedule. But is also requires more courage, since there will be much more dead ends (or worse) available.
Nonetheless, I just wrote that I want to venture into this unknown beyond, and in force. Hence it is reasonable - in fact necessary - to pose the question: Why? If I do not know and have too little information, is there any chance to hit the right answer? The answer to this: Probably not. But...
Actually, there are two buts. One is simply curiosity. I am a theorist, and I can always pose the question how does something work, even without having a special application or situation in mind. Though this may just end up as nothing, it would not be the first time that the answer to a question has been discovered long before the question. In fact, the single most important building block of the standard-model, so-called Yang-Mills theory, has been discovered by theorists almost a decade before it was recognized to be the key to explain the experimental results.
But this is not the main reason for me to venture into this direction. The main reason has to do with the experience I made with Higgs physics - that despite appearance there is often a second layer to the theory. Such a second layer has in this case shifted the perception of how things we describe in theory correlate with the things we see in experiment. Since many proposed theories beyond the standard model, especially such as have caught my interest, are extensions of the Higgs of the standard model. It thus stands to reason that similar statements hold true in their cases. However, whether they hold true, and how they work cannot be fathomed without looking at theses theories. And that is what I want to do.
Why should one do this? Such subtle questions seem to be at first not really related to experiment. But understanding how a theory really works should also give us a better idea of what kind of observations such a theory can actually deliver. And now it becomes very interesting for an experiment. Since we do at the current time not know what to expect, we need to think about what we could expect. This is especially important as to look in every corner requires much more resources than available to us in the foreseeable future. Hence, any insights into what kind of experimental results a theory can yield is very important to select where to focus.
Of course, my research alone will not be sufficient to do this. Since it easily can be that I am looking at the 'wrong' theory, it would not be a good idea to put too much effort in it. But, when there are many theoreticians working on many theories, and many theories all say that it is a good idea to look into a particular direction: Then we have a guidance for where to look. Then there seems to be something special in this direction. And if not, then we have excluded a lot of theories in one go.
As one person in a discussion session (I could not figure out who precisely) has put it aptly at the conference: "The time of guaranteed discoveries is over.". This means that now that we have all pieces of the standard model, we cannot expect to find a new piece any time soon. All our indirect results even tell us that the next piece will be much harder to find. Hence, we are facing a situation as was last seen in physics in the second half of the 19th century and beginning 20th century: There are only some hints that something does not fit. And now we have to go looking, without knowing in advance how far we will have to walk. Or in which direction. This is probably more of an adventure than the last decades, where things where essentially happening on schedule. But is also requires more courage, since there will be much more dead ends (or worse) available.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Why does chemistry work?
This seems to be an odd question to ask in a blog about particle physics. But, as you will see, it actually makes connection to a very deep problem of particle physics. A problem, which I am currently turning my attention to. Hence, in preparation of things to come, I write this blog entry.
So, where is the connection? Well, chemistry is actually all about the electromagnetic interaction. One of the most important features is that atoms are electrically neutral. This is only possible, if the atomic nucleus has the same positive charge as its surrounding electrons have a negative one. The electrons are elementary particles, as far as we know. The atomic nucleus, however, is ultimately made up of quarks. So the last statement boils down to the fact that the total electric charge of the quarks in the nucleus has to compensate the one of the electrons. Sounds simple enough. And this is in fact something which has been established very exactly in experiment. The compensation is much better than one part in a billion - within our best efforts, the cancellation appears perfect.
The problem is that it is not necessary, according to our current knowledge. Quarks and electrons are very different objects in particle physics. So, why should they carry electric charge such that this balancing is possible? The answer to this is, as often: We do not know. Yet.
When we are just looking at electromagnetism, there is actually no theoretical reason why they should have balanced electric charges. Electromagnetism would work in exactly the same way if they did not, if they would have arbitrarily different charges. Of course, atoms are then no longer neutral. And chemistry would then work quite differently.
If there is no simple explanation in the details, one should look at the big picture. Perhaps it helps. In this case it does, but this time not in a very useful way.
Electromagnetism does not stand on its own. It is part of the standard model of particle physics. And here things start to become seriously bizarre.
I am a theorist. Hence, the internal consistency of a theory is something quite important to me. The standard model of particle physics as a theory turns out to be consistent if very precise relations exist between the various particles in it - and the charge they carry. The exact cancellation of electric charges in the atoms we observe is one of the very few possibilities how the standard model can work theoretically.
So, did we explain it now? Unfortunately, no. "The theory should work" is not an adequate requirement for a description of nature. The game goes the other way around. Nature dictates, and our theory must describe it. Experiment rules theory in physics.
So the fact that we need this cancellation is troublesome: We only know that we need it. But it is just there, we cannot explain it with what we know.
So that is the point to enter speculation. We know theories in which the electromagnetic charge cancellation is not 'just there', but it follows immediately from the structure of the theory. The best known examples of such theories are the so-called grand-unified theories. In these, there is a super-force, and the known forces of the standard model are just different facets of this super-force. The fact that electrons and quarks have canceling charges in such a theory just stems from the fact that everything originates in this one super-force.
It is possible to write down a theory of such a super-force, which is compatible with our current experiments. But so is the standard model. Hence, only if we find an experimental result, in which a theory of such a super-force shows a distinct behavior to the standard-model, we can be sure that it exists. This is not (yet?) the case.
At the same time, we so far know relatively little about many aspects of such a theory. This is the reason for me to start getting interested in it. Especially, there are still conceptual questions we need to answer. I will write about them in future entries. Because it will be quite interesting and challenging to understand these things.
So, where is the connection? Well, chemistry is actually all about the electromagnetic interaction. One of the most important features is that atoms are electrically neutral. This is only possible, if the atomic nucleus has the same positive charge as its surrounding electrons have a negative one. The electrons are elementary particles, as far as we know. The atomic nucleus, however, is ultimately made up of quarks. So the last statement boils down to the fact that the total electric charge of the quarks in the nucleus has to compensate the one of the electrons. Sounds simple enough. And this is in fact something which has been established very exactly in experiment. The compensation is much better than one part in a billion - within our best efforts, the cancellation appears perfect.
The problem is that it is not necessary, according to our current knowledge. Quarks and electrons are very different objects in particle physics. So, why should they carry electric charge such that this balancing is possible? The answer to this is, as often: We do not know. Yet.
When we are just looking at electromagnetism, there is actually no theoretical reason why they should have balanced electric charges. Electromagnetism would work in exactly the same way if they did not, if they would have arbitrarily different charges. Of course, atoms are then no longer neutral. And chemistry would then work quite differently.
If there is no simple explanation in the details, one should look at the big picture. Perhaps it helps. In this case it does, but this time not in a very useful way.
Electromagnetism does not stand on its own. It is part of the standard model of particle physics. And here things start to become seriously bizarre.
I am a theorist. Hence, the internal consistency of a theory is something quite important to me. The standard model of particle physics as a theory turns out to be consistent if very precise relations exist between the various particles in it - and the charge they carry. The exact cancellation of electric charges in the atoms we observe is one of the very few possibilities how the standard model can work theoretically.
So, did we explain it now? Unfortunately, no. "The theory should work" is not an adequate requirement for a description of nature. The game goes the other way around. Nature dictates, and our theory must describe it. Experiment rules theory in physics.
So the fact that we need this cancellation is troublesome: We only know that we need it. But it is just there, we cannot explain it with what we know.
So that is the point to enter speculation. We know theories in which the electromagnetic charge cancellation is not 'just there', but it follows immediately from the structure of the theory. The best known examples of such theories are the so-called grand-unified theories. In these, there is a super-force, and the known forces of the standard model are just different facets of this super-force. The fact that electrons and quarks have canceling charges in such a theory just stems from the fact that everything originates in this one super-force.
It is possible to write down a theory of such a super-force, which is compatible with our current experiments. But so is the standard model. Hence, only if we find an experimental result, in which a theory of such a super-force shows a distinct behavior to the standard-model, we can be sure that it exists. This is not (yet?) the case.
At the same time, we so far know relatively little about many aspects of such a theory. This is the reason for me to start getting interested in it. Especially, there are still conceptual questions we need to answer. I will write about them in future entries. Because it will be quite interesting and challenging to understand these things.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Looking for something out of the ordinary
A few days ago, I was at a quite interesting workshop on "Anomalous quartic gauge couplings". Since the topic itself is quite interesting and has significant relevance to my own research on Higgs physics, I like to spend this entry on it. Let me start with describing what the workshop was about, and what is behind its rather obscure title.
At the experiments at the LHC what we do is smashing two protons into each other. Occasionally, either of two things may happen. The first possibility is that in the process each proton emits a W or Z boson, the carriers of the weak force. These two particles may collide themselves, but emerge without change. That is what we call an elastic scattering. Afterwards, these bosons are detected. Or rather, they are indirectly detected by their decay products. The second possibility is that either of the protons emits a very energetic W or Z, which then splits into three of these afterwards. These are then, again indirectly, observed. This is called an inelastic effect. Of course, much more usually goes on, but I will concentrate here on the most important part of the collision.
At first sight, both types of events may not have to do a lot with each other. But they have something important in common: In all cases four particles are involved. They may be any combination of Ws and Zs. To avoid further excessive use of 'W or Z', I will just call them all Ws. The details of which is which is not really important right now.
The fact that four are involved explains already the quartic in the name of the workshop. In the standard model of particle physics, that what happens can occur mainly in either of two ways. One is that two Ws form for some time another particle. This may either be another W or Z, or also a Higgs. Or they can all four interact with each other at the same time. That is then called a quartic gauge coupling, and thus the complete second half of the name of the workshop.
Now what is not right with this, as we talk about something anomalous? Actually, everything is all right with it in the standard model. But we are not only interested what there is in the standard model, but also whether there is something else. If there is something else, what we observe should not fit with what we calculate in the standard model alone. Such a difference would thus be anomalous. Hence, if we would measure that the quartic gauge coupling is different from the one we calculate in the standard model, we call it an anomalous quartic gauge coupling. And then we are happy, since we found something new. Hence, the workshop was about looking for such anomalous quartic gauge couplings. So far, we did not find anything, but we do not yet have seen many such situations. Far too few to make already any statements. But we will record many more in the future. Then we can make really a statement. At this workshop we were thus essentially preparing for the new data, which we expected to come in once the LHC is switched on again in early 2014.
What has this to do with my research? Well, I try to figure out whether two Higgs, or Ws, can form a bound state. If such bound states would exist, they would form exactly in such processes, for a very short time. Afterwards, they again decay into the final Ws. If they form, they would contribute to what we know. They are part of the standard model. So to see something new, we have to subtract their contributions, if they are there. Otherwise, they could be mistaken for a new, anomalous effect. Most important for me at the workshop was to understand, what is measured, and how they could contribute. It was also important to know what can be measured at all, since any experimental constraint I can get would help me in improving my calculations. This kind of connecting experiment and theory is very important for us, as we are yet far from the point where our results are perfect. The developments in this area remain therefore very important to my own research project.
At the experiments at the LHC what we do is smashing two protons into each other. Occasionally, either of two things may happen. The first possibility is that in the process each proton emits a W or Z boson, the carriers of the weak force. These two particles may collide themselves, but emerge without change. That is what we call an elastic scattering. Afterwards, these bosons are detected. Or rather, they are indirectly detected by their decay products. The second possibility is that either of the protons emits a very energetic W or Z, which then splits into three of these afterwards. These are then, again indirectly, observed. This is called an inelastic effect. Of course, much more usually goes on, but I will concentrate here on the most important part of the collision.
At first sight, both types of events may not have to do a lot with each other. But they have something important in common: In all cases four particles are involved. They may be any combination of Ws and Zs. To avoid further excessive use of 'W or Z', I will just call them all Ws. The details of which is which is not really important right now.
The fact that four are involved explains already the quartic in the name of the workshop. In the standard model of particle physics, that what happens can occur mainly in either of two ways. One is that two Ws form for some time another particle. This may either be another W or Z, or also a Higgs. Or they can all four interact with each other at the same time. That is then called a quartic gauge coupling, and thus the complete second half of the name of the workshop.
Now what is not right with this, as we talk about something anomalous? Actually, everything is all right with it in the standard model. But we are not only interested what there is in the standard model, but also whether there is something else. If there is something else, what we observe should not fit with what we calculate in the standard model alone. Such a difference would thus be anomalous. Hence, if we would measure that the quartic gauge coupling is different from the one we calculate in the standard model, we call it an anomalous quartic gauge coupling. And then we are happy, since we found something new. Hence, the workshop was about looking for such anomalous quartic gauge couplings. So far, we did not find anything, but we do not yet have seen many such situations. Far too few to make already any statements. But we will record many more in the future. Then we can make really a statement. At this workshop we were thus essentially preparing for the new data, which we expected to come in once the LHC is switched on again in early 2014.
What has this to do with my research? Well, I try to figure out whether two Higgs, or Ws, can form a bound state. If such bound states would exist, they would form exactly in such processes, for a very short time. Afterwards, they again decay into the final Ws. If they form, they would contribute to what we know. They are part of the standard model. So to see something new, we have to subtract their contributions, if they are there. Otherwise, they could be mistaken for a new, anomalous effect. Most important for me at the workshop was to understand, what is measured, and how they could contribute. It was also important to know what can be measured at all, since any experimental constraint I can get would help me in improving my calculations. This kind of connecting experiment and theory is very important for us, as we are yet far from the point where our results are perfect. The developments in this area remain therefore very important to my own research project.
Friday, May 17, 2013
What could the Higgs be made of?
One of the topics I am working on is how the standard model of particle physics can be extended. The reason is that it is, intrinsically, but not practically, flawed. Therefore, we know that there must be more. However, right now we have only very vague hints from experiments and astronomical observations how we have to improve our theories. Therefore, many possibilities are right now explored. The one I am working on is called technicolor.
A few weeks ago, my master student and I have published a preprint. By the way, a preprint is a paper which is in the process of being reviewed by the scientific community, whether it is sound. They play an important role in science, as they contain the most recent results. Anyway, in this preprint, we have worked on technicolor. I will not rehearse too much about technicolor here, this can be found in an earlier blog entry. The only important ingredient is that in a technicolor scenario one assumes that the Higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, just like an atom, it is made from other particles. In analogy to quarks, which build up the protons and other hadrons, these parts of the Higgs are called techniquarks. Of course, something has to hold them together. This must be a new, unknown force, called techniforce. It is imagined to be again similar, in a very rough way, to the strong force. Consequently, the carrier of this fore are called technigluons, in analogy to the gluons of the strong force.
In our research we wanted to understand the properties of these techniquarks. Since we do not yet know if there is really technicolor, we can also not be sure of how it would eventually look like. In fact, there are many possibilities how technicolor could look like. So many that it is not even simple to enumerate them all, much less to calculate for all of them simultaneously. But since we are anyhow not sure, which is the right one, we are not yet in a position where it makes sense to be overly precise. In fact, what we wanted to understand is how techniquarks work in principle. Therefore, we just selected out of the many possibilities just one.
Now, as I said, techniquarks are imagined to be similar to quarks. But they cannot be the same, because we know that the Higgs behaves very different from, say, a proton or a pion. It is not possible to get this effect without making the techniquarks profoundly different from the quarks. One of the possibilities to do so is by making them a thing in between a gluon and a quark, which is called an adjoint quark. The term 'adjoint' is referring to some mathematical property, but these are not so important details. So that is what we did: We assumed our techniquarks should be adjoint quarks.
The major difference is now what happens if we make these techniquarks light and lighter. For the strong force, we know what happens: We cannot make them arbitrarily light, because they gain mass from the strong force. This appears to be different for the theory we studied. There you can make them arbitrarily light. This has been suspected since a long time from indirect observations. What we did was, for the first time, to directly investigate the techniquarks. What we saw was that when they are rather heavy, we have a similar effect like for the strong force: The techniquarks gain mass from the force. But once they got light enough, this effect ceases. Thus, it should be possible to make them massless. This possibility is necessary to make a Higgs out of them.
Unfortunately, because we used computer simulations, we could not really go to massless techniquarks. This is far too expensive in terms of the time needed to do computer simulations (and actually, already part of the simulations were provided by other people, for which we are very grateful). Thus, we could not make sure that it is the case. But our results point strongly in this direction.
So is this a viable new theory? Well, we have shown that a necessary condition is fulfilled. But there is a strong difference between necessary and sufficient. For a technicolor theory to be useful it should not only have a Higgs made from techniquarks, and no mass generation from the techniforce. It must also have more properties, to be ok with what we know from experiment. The major requirement is how strong the techniforce is over how long distances. There existed some indirect earlier evidence that for this theory the techniforce is not quite strong enough for sufficiently far distances to be good enough. Our calculations have again a more direct way of determining this strength. And unfortunately, it appears that we have to agree with this earlier calculations.
Is this the end of technicolor? Certainly not. As I said above, technicolor is foremost an idea. There are many possibilities how to implement this idea, and we have just checked one. Is it then the end of this version? We have to agree with the earlier investigations that it appears so in this pure form. But, in fact, in this purest form we have neglected a lot, like the rest of the standard model. There is still a significant chance that a more complete version could work. After all, the qualitative features are there, it is just that the numbers are not perfectly right. Or perhaps just a minor alteration may already do the job. And this is something where people are continuing working on.
A few weeks ago, my master student and I have published a preprint. By the way, a preprint is a paper which is in the process of being reviewed by the scientific community, whether it is sound. They play an important role in science, as they contain the most recent results. Anyway, in this preprint, we have worked on technicolor. I will not rehearse too much about technicolor here, this can be found in an earlier blog entry. The only important ingredient is that in a technicolor scenario one assumes that the Higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, just like an atom, it is made from other particles. In analogy to quarks, which build up the protons and other hadrons, these parts of the Higgs are called techniquarks. Of course, something has to hold them together. This must be a new, unknown force, called techniforce. It is imagined to be again similar, in a very rough way, to the strong force. Consequently, the carrier of this fore are called technigluons, in analogy to the gluons of the strong force.
In our research we wanted to understand the properties of these techniquarks. Since we do not yet know if there is really technicolor, we can also not be sure of how it would eventually look like. In fact, there are many possibilities how technicolor could look like. So many that it is not even simple to enumerate them all, much less to calculate for all of them simultaneously. But since we are anyhow not sure, which is the right one, we are not yet in a position where it makes sense to be overly precise. In fact, what we wanted to understand is how techniquarks work in principle. Therefore, we just selected out of the many possibilities just one.
Now, as I said, techniquarks are imagined to be similar to quarks. But they cannot be the same, because we know that the Higgs behaves very different from, say, a proton or a pion. It is not possible to get this effect without making the techniquarks profoundly different from the quarks. One of the possibilities to do so is by making them a thing in between a gluon and a quark, which is called an adjoint quark. The term 'adjoint' is referring to some mathematical property, but these are not so important details. So that is what we did: We assumed our techniquarks should be adjoint quarks.
The major difference is now what happens if we make these techniquarks light and lighter. For the strong force, we know what happens: We cannot make them arbitrarily light, because they gain mass from the strong force. This appears to be different for the theory we studied. There you can make them arbitrarily light. This has been suspected since a long time from indirect observations. What we did was, for the first time, to directly investigate the techniquarks. What we saw was that when they are rather heavy, we have a similar effect like for the strong force: The techniquarks gain mass from the force. But once they got light enough, this effect ceases. Thus, it should be possible to make them massless. This possibility is necessary to make a Higgs out of them.
Unfortunately, because we used computer simulations, we could not really go to massless techniquarks. This is far too expensive in terms of the time needed to do computer simulations (and actually, already part of the simulations were provided by other people, for which we are very grateful). Thus, we could not make sure that it is the case. But our results point strongly in this direction.
So is this a viable new theory? Well, we have shown that a necessary condition is fulfilled. But there is a strong difference between necessary and sufficient. For a technicolor theory to be useful it should not only have a Higgs made from techniquarks, and no mass generation from the techniforce. It must also have more properties, to be ok with what we know from experiment. The major requirement is how strong the techniforce is over how long distances. There existed some indirect earlier evidence that for this theory the techniforce is not quite strong enough for sufficiently far distances to be good enough. Our calculations have again a more direct way of determining this strength. And unfortunately, it appears that we have to agree with this earlier calculations.
Is this the end of technicolor? Certainly not. As I said above, technicolor is foremost an idea. There are many possibilities how to implement this idea, and we have just checked one. Is it then the end of this version? We have to agree with the earlier investigations that it appears so in this pure form. But, in fact, in this purest form we have neglected a lot, like the rest of the standard model. There is still a significant chance that a more complete version could work. After all, the qualitative features are there, it is just that the numbers are not perfectly right. Or perhaps just a minor alteration may already do the job. And this is something where people are continuing working on.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Technicolor
Last time, I described our reasons and attempts to go beyond the standard model. Among the myriads of possibilities of extensions of the standard model there is one, on which I work. Let me describe it first. Then, I will tell you, why I find especially this one interesting.
This extension of the standard model is called technicolor. It is one of the bottom-up approaches. It was mainly conceived to cure problems we have with the Higgs particle. One particular annoying problem with the Higgs is that its mass is not constrained in the standard model. Well, this is not yet really a problem, since neither are the masses of any of the other particles. But the Higgs mass is in so far different as it is very sensitive to the rest of the standard model. If we change the properties of the standard model by a factor of, say, a hundred, the electron mass will only change by a factor of two, or so. But the Higgs mass will change by a factor ten thousand. Both statements are, of course, very rough, but you should get the idea: To get the Higgs mass to the value we will, hopefully soon, measure, we have to be very careful with the standard model. We have to tune it very finely. This is called the fine-tuning problem, or also the hierarchy problem. It is actually a perceived problem only. Nature may be "just so". But so far, whenever nature seemed to be "just so", there was actually a deeper reason behind it.
Thus, people have set out to find an explanation for this extreme sensitivity of the Higgs mass. Well, actually, people rather have searched for an alternative to the standard model, where this is not the case.
One of the possibilities, which has been conceived, was technicolor. The rather poetic name comes from the historical fact that QCD with its colors has been a role model for technicolor. However, in the decades after its original inception in the 1970ies, technicolor has changed a lot. Today, this theory has only remote similarities to QCD, but, of course, the name stuck once more.
So how does technicolor works? Actually, technicolor is not really a single theory. Since we do not yet have any experimental information about the Higgs, we are not yet able to restrict such extensions of the standard model very well. Thus, there are many theories, which could be called technicolor. It is more an idea than a strict mathematical concept, and it can come in many disguises. The basic idea is that the Higgs is not an elementary particle. Rather, it is made out of other particles, which are called techniquarks. These are held together by exchanging technigluons - once more you see how QCD has been inspirational to the naming.
You may ask what one wins by making the Higgs a more complicated object. The answer is that the Higgs mass, once made out of other (fermionic) particles, is no longer so sensitive, but behaves like the other masses in the standard model. Thus, this solves the problem one has set out to solve.
Of course, as long as we do not yet have found the Higgs, we cannot yet tell whether it is really made up out of other particles. And even when we find it, it will be very complicated to determine whether it is, and it will take a lot of time and a lot of experiments.
But it turns out that things do not come so freely. As you may remember, we needed the Higgs also to provide mass to the other particles in the standard model. And this becomes much more complicated once the Higgs is made out of techniquarks. The reason is that the standard model Higgs is rather flexible, and we can adjust its interactions with the other particles so that the right mass of, say, the electron comes out. This is no longer easily possible once the Higgs has a substructure. This has led in the 1980ies to the believe that technicolor cannot work.
In 1990ies, and now after 2000, however, clever people found a way to make it work. The original problem came about because in the beginning technicolor was made too much alike to QCD. Once one is satisfied with a theory being more different from QCD, and being willing to add a few more particles, the situation improves. Unfortunately, without guidance by experimental results it becomes somewhat ambiguous how to solve the problem, but it seems feasible after all.
So far, this is the status of technicolor. Why am I interested in it?
If you want to make the Higgs from two techniquarks and at the same time simulate the Higgs effect, it is necessary to introduce a new mechanism to the theory. When you look at QCD, its strength depends on the energy. Actually, it does so in a very violent way, and QCD changes from strongly interacting to weakly interacting very quickly. To make the technicolor idea work, this had to change. Technicolor needs to change from strongly interacting to weakly interacting very slowly. To make this distinction more vivid, QCD is called a running theory while technicolor is called a walking theory. This means that technicolor is strongly interacting for a large range of energies. As with any strongly interacting theory, its description is very complicated. Since we know such theories only since a couple of years, we are really at the beginning of understanding them, even the very basic mechanisms of them. But this is what we need to do, if we ever want to make a real quantitative comparison to experiment. And that interests me. I want to understand how such theories work at a very fundamental level. They are so strange compared to the rest of the standard model, and to many other proposal beyond the standard model, that they are a very fascinating topic. And that is, why I am studying them.
This extension of the standard model is called technicolor. It is one of the bottom-up approaches. It was mainly conceived to cure problems we have with the Higgs particle. One particular annoying problem with the Higgs is that its mass is not constrained in the standard model. Well, this is not yet really a problem, since neither are the masses of any of the other particles. But the Higgs mass is in so far different as it is very sensitive to the rest of the standard model. If we change the properties of the standard model by a factor of, say, a hundred, the electron mass will only change by a factor of two, or so. But the Higgs mass will change by a factor ten thousand. Both statements are, of course, very rough, but you should get the idea: To get the Higgs mass to the value we will, hopefully soon, measure, we have to be very careful with the standard model. We have to tune it very finely. This is called the fine-tuning problem, or also the hierarchy problem. It is actually a perceived problem only. Nature may be "just so". But so far, whenever nature seemed to be "just so", there was actually a deeper reason behind it.
Thus, people have set out to find an explanation for this extreme sensitivity of the Higgs mass. Well, actually, people rather have searched for an alternative to the standard model, where this is not the case.
One of the possibilities, which has been conceived, was technicolor. The rather poetic name comes from the historical fact that QCD with its colors has been a role model for technicolor. However, in the decades after its original inception in the 1970ies, technicolor has changed a lot. Today, this theory has only remote similarities to QCD, but, of course, the name stuck once more.
So how does technicolor works? Actually, technicolor is not really a single theory. Since we do not yet have any experimental information about the Higgs, we are not yet able to restrict such extensions of the standard model very well. Thus, there are many theories, which could be called technicolor. It is more an idea than a strict mathematical concept, and it can come in many disguises. The basic idea is that the Higgs is not an elementary particle. Rather, it is made out of other particles, which are called techniquarks. These are held together by exchanging technigluons - once more you see how QCD has been inspirational to the naming.
You may ask what one wins by making the Higgs a more complicated object. The answer is that the Higgs mass, once made out of other (fermionic) particles, is no longer so sensitive, but behaves like the other masses in the standard model. Thus, this solves the problem one has set out to solve.
Of course, as long as we do not yet have found the Higgs, we cannot yet tell whether it is really made up out of other particles. And even when we find it, it will be very complicated to determine whether it is, and it will take a lot of time and a lot of experiments.
But it turns out that things do not come so freely. As you may remember, we needed the Higgs also to provide mass to the other particles in the standard model. And this becomes much more complicated once the Higgs is made out of techniquarks. The reason is that the standard model Higgs is rather flexible, and we can adjust its interactions with the other particles so that the right mass of, say, the electron comes out. This is no longer easily possible once the Higgs has a substructure. This has led in the 1980ies to the believe that technicolor cannot work.
In 1990ies, and now after 2000, however, clever people found a way to make it work. The original problem came about because in the beginning technicolor was made too much alike to QCD. Once one is satisfied with a theory being more different from QCD, and being willing to add a few more particles, the situation improves. Unfortunately, without guidance by experimental results it becomes somewhat ambiguous how to solve the problem, but it seems feasible after all.
So far, this is the status of technicolor. Why am I interested in it?
If you want to make the Higgs from two techniquarks and at the same time simulate the Higgs effect, it is necessary to introduce a new mechanism to the theory. When you look at QCD, its strength depends on the energy. Actually, it does so in a very violent way, and QCD changes from strongly interacting to weakly interacting very quickly. To make the technicolor idea work, this had to change. Technicolor needs to change from strongly interacting to weakly interacting very slowly. To make this distinction more vivid, QCD is called a running theory while technicolor is called a walking theory. This means that technicolor is strongly interacting for a large range of energies. As with any strongly interacting theory, its description is very complicated. Since we know such theories only since a couple of years, we are really at the beginning of understanding them, even the very basic mechanisms of them. But this is what we need to do, if we ever want to make a real quantitative comparison to experiment. And that interests me. I want to understand how such theories work at a very fundamental level. They are so strange compared to the rest of the standard model, and to many other proposal beyond the standard model, that they are a very fascinating topic. And that is, why I am studying them.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Above and beyond
Before I can introduce my last research topic, I have first to go above and beyond the standard model. Given that I am calling this blog a tourist guide to the standard model, this is a bit like trespassing. But that is how my research went over the last years. So let me keep the name, but nonetheless venture beyond.
With keeping the name, I am using a very important concept in scientific naming: For historic reasons. For historic reasons, this blog was named, but then reality overtook it. This is something very often happening in physics. In the beginning, we encounter a phenomena. To not always have to describe it, we give it a name, based on what we have encountered so far. Very often, when we really understand what is going on, this name would no longer be appropriate. But at this time, the name stuck, and thus we stick with it. You should keep this in mind, when you think that the name of something seems to have nothing to do with the thing. Then the name is just there for historic reasons. And that is something one will also encounter beyond the standard model.
So let us go beyond the standard model. As I told you, the standard model is just that: A model. It has its limits. We know today, mostly for reasons of mathematical consistency and for astronomical observations that the standard model cannot be the end. We know that with what we have we cannot explain what happens at very high energies. We also cannot explain with the standard model why the outer rims of the galaxies rotate faster than they should. We do not know why the universe is expanding faster and faster. We do not know why the particles have precisely the masses they have. We cannot tell, why nature is such that the sun can shine: Given the standard model, we can explain how the sun shines. But we cannot explain why the standard model is such that this is possible. And there are many other things.
However, irritatingly, all our experiments here on earth have been in accordance with the standard model.
This is very unsatisfactory, to say the least. As a consequence, almost since the birth of the standard model in its present form people have started to consider extensions of it. This is commonly known as beyond-the-standard-model models, or BSM for short. Unfortunately, the observations listed above are not pointing all in the same direction. Actually, most just point somewhere, for the amount of knowledge we have of them. Thus, we are, right now, very much in the dark when it comes to figure out how we should extend the standard model.
This lead to very many proposals. Even listing all conceptual proposals would easily fill a couple of months worth of blog entries. But they can be broadly distinguished by their approach. Some have a top-down approach. They try to envisage the underlying theory, which will solve all (or many) of the known problems in one strike. You may have heard of (super)string theory. This is one example of this approach. The other is bottom-up. Here, one just tries to resolve a single problem. The ones I am working on belong to the latter category.
Now, what is the state of affairs? Top-down approaches are often rather complicated theories, and it is often very complicated to calculate anything at all. Thus, progress on this side is naturally slow. The bottom-up approaches are often more tractable. It is often not too complicate to design a theory, which solves the problem one was setting out to solve. However, in doing so one usually gets for a completely different thing a result which disagrees with the known experiments. Thus, one is forced to modify the model to sate this problem. But then the next springs up, and one finds oneself adding bits and pieces to the model, until it becomes rather baroque.
You may say now: Well, if things are either too complicated or too much mingling, maybe you are on the wrong track. And I would not really disagree with you. Of course, nothing prevents nature from being really complicated or baroque. Just because both versions do not look aesthetically pleasing to us does not mean it cannot be. But this way of thinking has never been right in the history of physics. When something got complicated, and any amendment made it worse, then we were on the wrong track.
So, why do we not abandon everything we did, take the standard model as the basis, and start over from scratch? This has actually been done many times, and so far was not successful. On the other hand, going back to the complicated theories, one hope is that by making the theory more complex by making more and more things agree with experiment, we can hope that at some point a pattern emerges. This has occurred in the past, and is thus a real possibility.
Thus, today, all of these possibilities are followed. We try to imagine solution to the problems, test them against experiments, both old and new, and reiterate. A spectacular new observation at any experiment would greatly help. That is why any ever so slight deviation from the standard model expectation is greeted with great enthusiasm by the theorist. Even if we know that in most cases this will be a coincidental fluke, which will go away when we keep looking more carefully.
Where will this lead us to? We do not know yet. That is the really exciting part of particle physics: We try to push the boundaries of knowledge, and we can only speculate what we will find there.
With keeping the name, I am using a very important concept in scientific naming: For historic reasons. For historic reasons, this blog was named, but then reality overtook it. This is something very often happening in physics. In the beginning, we encounter a phenomena. To not always have to describe it, we give it a name, based on what we have encountered so far. Very often, when we really understand what is going on, this name would no longer be appropriate. But at this time, the name stuck, and thus we stick with it. You should keep this in mind, when you think that the name of something seems to have nothing to do with the thing. Then the name is just there for historic reasons. And that is something one will also encounter beyond the standard model.
So let us go beyond the standard model. As I told you, the standard model is just that: A model. It has its limits. We know today, mostly for reasons of mathematical consistency and for astronomical observations that the standard model cannot be the end. We know that with what we have we cannot explain what happens at very high energies. We also cannot explain with the standard model why the outer rims of the galaxies rotate faster than they should. We do not know why the universe is expanding faster and faster. We do not know why the particles have precisely the masses they have. We cannot tell, why nature is such that the sun can shine: Given the standard model, we can explain how the sun shines. But we cannot explain why the standard model is such that this is possible. And there are many other things.
However, irritatingly, all our experiments here on earth have been in accordance with the standard model.
This is very unsatisfactory, to say the least. As a consequence, almost since the birth of the standard model in its present form people have started to consider extensions of it. This is commonly known as beyond-the-standard-model models, or BSM for short. Unfortunately, the observations listed above are not pointing all in the same direction. Actually, most just point somewhere, for the amount of knowledge we have of them. Thus, we are, right now, very much in the dark when it comes to figure out how we should extend the standard model.
This lead to very many proposals. Even listing all conceptual proposals would easily fill a couple of months worth of blog entries. But they can be broadly distinguished by their approach. Some have a top-down approach. They try to envisage the underlying theory, which will solve all (or many) of the known problems in one strike. You may have heard of (super)string theory. This is one example of this approach. The other is bottom-up. Here, one just tries to resolve a single problem. The ones I am working on belong to the latter category.
Now, what is the state of affairs? Top-down approaches are often rather complicated theories, and it is often very complicated to calculate anything at all. Thus, progress on this side is naturally slow. The bottom-up approaches are often more tractable. It is often not too complicate to design a theory, which solves the problem one was setting out to solve. However, in doing so one usually gets for a completely different thing a result which disagrees with the known experiments. Thus, one is forced to modify the model to sate this problem. But then the next springs up, and one finds oneself adding bits and pieces to the model, until it becomes rather baroque.
You may say now: Well, if things are either too complicated or too much mingling, maybe you are on the wrong track. And I would not really disagree with you. Of course, nothing prevents nature from being really complicated or baroque. Just because both versions do not look aesthetically pleasing to us does not mean it cannot be. But this way of thinking has never been right in the history of physics. When something got complicated, and any amendment made it worse, then we were on the wrong track.
So, why do we not abandon everything we did, take the standard model as the basis, and start over from scratch? This has actually been done many times, and so far was not successful. On the other hand, going back to the complicated theories, one hope is that by making the theory more complex by making more and more things agree with experiment, we can hope that at some point a pattern emerges. This has occurred in the past, and is thus a real possibility.
Thus, today, all of these possibilities are followed. We try to imagine solution to the problems, test them against experiments, both old and new, and reiterate. A spectacular new observation at any experiment would greatly help. That is why any ever so slight deviation from the standard model expectation is greeted with great enthusiasm by the theorist. Even if we know that in most cases this will be a coincidental fluke, which will go away when we keep looking more carefully.
Where will this lead us to? We do not know yet. That is the really exciting part of particle physics: We try to push the boundaries of knowledge, and we can only speculate what we will find there.
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