What is a proton made of?

We have published a new paper, which has quite a bold topic: That a proton has a bit more structure than what you usually hear about.

Usually, you hear a proton is made up out of three quarks, the so-called valence quarks. These quarks, two up-quarks and one down quark, are termed valence quarks. Valence particles provide the proton with its characteristic properties, like its electric charge and spin. In addition, every other particle can also appear inside the proton, as a so-called sea particle. But these are quantum fluctuations, which are only very short lived. There existence has been tested in experiments for gluons, strange quarks, charm quarks, and bottom quarks, as well as photons. We understand this relatively well. Their contribution gets smaller the larger their mass is. So what do we want to add?

Those people reading this blog longer have already seen that one of the central topics we are looking at in our research are the weak interactions and the Higgs. Especially, we figured out that this part of the standard model of particle physics is more involved than is usually assumed. Most importantly, it requires for mathematical consistency that most particles, which we usually call elementary, are more involved bound states, i.e. made up out of multiple particles. Such bound states are very different from elementary particles. E.g., they should have a size. And, in principle, this should show up in experiments.

Of course, mathematical consistency is not sufficient for nature to behave is a certain way. Though it is nice if it does. Therefore 'should' is not sufficient. If we are right, it *must* show up in experiments. Unfortunately, as all of this is associated with the Higgs, which is very heavy, this requires a lot of energy. Since there is currently only one powerful enough experiment available, the LHC at CERN, we need to figure out how to test our ideas with this one. Which, unfortunately, is not ideally suited. But you have to make do with what you have.

Already two years back we figured out that all of the mathematical consistency arguments had a surprising impact for our proton. You see, the proton is one of two very similar particles, the proton and the neutron, the so-called nucleons. They make up all atomic nuclei. The difference between proton and neutron are threefold. Two are their mass and electric charge. They are explained by the valence quarks. The third is the protoness and neutroness - a feature which is called flavor (or sometimes isospin). The aforementioned valence quarks can actually not be really responsible for this quantum number. The argument is very technical, and has a lot to do with gauge symmetry, and especially its more involved aspects. Those who are interested in all the technical details can find it in my review article. Ultimately, it boils down that this flavor cannot come from the valence quarks. Something else needs to provide it.

This something else should not upset those things which are explained by the valence quarks, the mass and spin. Thus, it needs to be spinless and chargeless. The Higgs is the only particle in the standard model, which fits the bill. And it indeed carries something, which can provide the difference between protons and neutrons. In technical terms, it is called the custodial quantum number. What only matters is that this quantity can have two different values, and one can be associated with being proton and the other with being neutron, mathematically completely consistent, if the Higgs is another valence particle.

As the Higgs is much heavier than the proton, the immediate question is, how can that be? But here the combination of quantum mechanics and relativity comes to the rescue. It allows a bound state to be lighter (or heavier) than the sum of the masses of their constituents. Actually, an hydrogen atom is, e.g., lighter than the mass of the constituent proton and electron. But only by an extremely small amount. In the proton, this now works in the same way, but hugely amplified. But we have examples that this is actually possible. So this is fine.

When we now smash two protons together, like at the LHC, we actually get its constituents to interact with each other. And we have now additional Higgs content, so these Higgs can interact as well. However, this will be suppressed by the large mass of the Higgs, as in this case the interaction is as 'if it was alone'. And then it is heavy. Thus, even at the LHC this will be rare.

What we did in the paper was to estimate how rare, and which processes could best be sensitive to this. We find that the LHC so far is not too sensitive to the valence Higgs beyond uncertainties, if the effect is really there. But we figure out that with the production of top quarks at the LHC we should have a sensitive handle for looking for the valence Higgs.

This is really just the first step in hunting the valence Higgs. And it may well be that we need a more powerful experiment in the future to really see the effect. Not to mention that our estimates a very crude, and a lot of calculations need still to be done much better. But it is the first time that the effect of the valence Higgs, as required from mathematical consistency of the standard model, is tested experimentally. And this is a big step into a completely unknown domain. Who knows what we will find along the way.

Acquiring a new field

I have recently started to look into a new field: Quantum gravity. In this entry, I would like to write a bit about how this happens, acquiring a new field. Such that you can get an idea what can lead a scientist to do such a thing. Of course, in future entries I will also write more about what I am doing, but it would be a bit early to do so right now.

Acquiring a new field in science is not something done lightly. One has always not enough time for the things one does already. And when you enter a new field, stuff is slow. You have to learn a lot of basics, need to get an overview of what has been done, and what is still open. Not to mention that you have to get used to a different jargon. Thus, one rarely does so lightly.

I have in the past written already one entry about how I came to do Higgs physics. This entry was written after the fact. I was looking back, and discussed my motivation how I saw it at that time. It will be an interesting thing to look back at this entry in a few years, and judge what is left of my original motivation. And how I feel about this knowing what happened since then. But for now, I only know the present. So, lets get to it.

Quantum gravity is the hypothetical quantum version of the ordinary theory of gravity, so-called general relativity. However, it has withstood quantization for a quite a while, though there has been huge progress in the last 25 years or so. If we could quantize it, its combination with the standard model and the simplest version of dark matter would likely be able to explain almost everything we can observe. Though even then a few open questions appear to remain.

But my interest in quantum gravity comes not from the promise of such a possibility. It has rather a quite different motivation. My interest started with the Higgs.

I have written many times that we work on an improvement in the way we look at the Higgs. And, by now, in fact of the standard model. In what we get, we see a clear distinction between two concepts: So-called gauge symmetries and global symmetries. As far as we understand the standard model, it appears that global symmetries determine how many particles of a certain type exists, and into which particles they can decay or be combined. Gauge symmetries, however, seem to be just auxiliary symmetries, which we use to make calculations feasible, and they do not have a direct impact on observations. They have, of course, an indirect impact. After all, in which theory which gauge symmetry can be used to facilitate things is different, and thus the kind of gauge symmetry is more a statement about which theory we work on.

Now, if you add gravity, the distinction between both appears to blur. The reason is that in gravity space itself is different. Especially, you can deform space. Now, the original distinction of global symmetries and gauge symmetries is their relation to space. A global symmetry is something which is the same from point to point. A gauge symmetry allows changes from point to point. Loosely speaking, of course.

In gravity, space is no longer fixed. It can itself be deformed from point to point. But if space itself can be deformed, then nothing can stay the same from point to point. Does then the concept of global symmetry still make sense? Or does all symmetries become just 'like' local symmetries? Or is there still a distinction? And what about general relativity itself? In a particular sense, it can be seen as a theory with a gauge symmetry of space. Makes this everything which lives on space automatically a gauge symmetry? If we want to understand the results of what we did in the standard model, where there is no gravity, in the real world, where there is gravity, then this needs to be resolved. How? Well, my research will hopefully answer this question. But I cannot do it yet.

These questions were already for some time in the back of my mind. A few years, I actually do not know how many exactly. As quantum gravity pops up in particle physics occasionally, and I have contact with several people working on it, I was exposed to this again and again. I knew, eventually, I will need to address it, if nobody else does. So far, nobody did.

But why now? What prompted me to start now with it? As so often in science, it were other scientists.

Last year at the end of November/beginning of December, I took part in a conference in Vienna. I had been invited to talk about our research. The meeting has a quite wide scope, and also present were several people, who work on black holes and quantum physics. In this area, one goes, in a sense, halfway towards quantum gravity: One has quantum particles, but they life in a classical gravity theory, but with strong gravitational effects. Which is usually a black hole. In such a setup, the deformations of space are fixed. And also non-quantum black holes can swallow stuff. This combination appears to make the following thing: Global symmetries appear to become meaningless, because everything associated with them can vanish in the black hole. However, keeping space deformations fixed means that local symmetries are also fixed. So they appear to become real, instead of auxiliary. Thus, this seems to be quite opposite to our result. And this, and the people doing this kind of research, challenged my view of symmetries. In fact, in such a half-way case, this effect seems to be there.

However, in a full quantum gravity theory, the game changes. Then also space deformations become dynamical. At the same time, black holes need no longer to have the characteristic to swallow stuff forever, because they become dynamical, too. They develop. Thus, to answer what happens really requires full quantum gravity. And because of this situation, I decided to start to work actively on quantum gravity. Because I needed to answer whether our picture of symmetries survive, at least approximately, when there is quantum gravity. And to be able to answer such challenges. And so it began.

Within the last six months, I have now worked through a lot of the basic stuff. I have now a rough idea of what is going on, and what needs to be done. And I think, I see a way how everything can be reconciled, and make sense. It will still need a long time to complete this, but I am very optimistic right now. So optimistic, in fact, that a few days back I gave my first talk, in which I discussed this issues including quantum gravity. It will still need time, before I have a first real result. But I am quite happy how thing progress.

And that is the story how I started to look at quantum gravity in earnest. If you want to join me in this endeavor: I am always looking for collaboration partners and, of course, students who want to do their thesis work on this subject 😁

Looking for something when no one knows how much is there

This time, I want to continue the discussion from some months ago. Back then, I was rather general on how we could test our most dramatic idea. This idea is connected to what we regard as elementary particles. So far, our idea is that those you have heard about, the electrons, the Higgs, and so on are truly the basic building blocks of nature. However, we have found a lot of evidence that indicate that we see in experiment, and call these names, are actually not the same as the elementary particles themselves. Rather, they are a kind of bound state of the elementary ones, which only look at first sight like they themselves would be the elementary ones. Sounds pretty weird, huh? And if it sounds weird, it means it needs to be tested. We did so with numerical simulations. They all agreed perfectly with the ideas. But, of course, its physics, and thus we need also an experiment. The only question is which one.

We had some ideas already a while back. One of them will be ready soon, and I will talk again about it in due time. But this will be rather indirect, and somewhat qualitative. The other, however, required a new experiment, which may need two more decades to build. Thus, both cannot be the answer alone, and we need something more.

And this more is what we are currently closing in. Because one has this kind of weird bound state structure to make the standard model consistent, not only exotic particles are more complicated than usually assumed. Ordinary ones are too. And most ordinary are protons, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. More importantly, protons is what is smashed together at the LHC at CERN. So, we have a machine already, which may be able to test it. But this is involved, as protons are very messy. They are already in the conventional picture bound states of quarks and gluons. Our results just say there are more components. Thus, we have somehow to disentangle old and new components. So, we have to be very careful in what we do.

Fortunately, there is a trick. All of this revolves around the Higgs. The Higgs has the property that interacts stronger with particles the heavier they are. The heaviest particles we know are the top quark, followed by the W and Z bosons. And the CMS experiment (and other experiments) at CERN has a measurement campaign to look at the production of these particles together! That is exactly where we expect something interesting can happen. However, our ideas are not the only ones leading to top quarks and Z bosons. There are many known processes which produce them as well. So we cannot just check whether they are there. Rather, we need to understand if there are there as expected. E.g., if they fly away from the interaction in the expected direction and with the expected speeds.

So what a master student and myself do is the following. We use a program, called HERWIG, which simulates such events. One of the people who created this program helped us to modify this program, so that we can test our ideas with it. What we now do is rather simple. An input to such simulations is how the structure of the proton looks like. Based on this, it simulates how the top quarks and Z bosons produced in a collision are distributed. We now just add our conjectured additional contributions to the proton, essentially a little bit of Higgs. We then check, how the distributions change. By comparing the changes to what we get in experiment, we can then deduced how large the Higgs contribution in the proton is. Moreover, we can even indirectly deduce its shape, i.e. how in the proton the Higgs is located.

And this we now study. We iterate modifications of the proton structure with comparison to experimental results and predictions without this Higgs contribution. Thereby, we constraint the Higgs contribution in the proton bit by bit. At the current time, we know that the data is only sufficient to provide an upper bound to this amount inside the proton. Our first estimates show already that this bound is actually not that strong, and quite a lot of Higgs could be inside the proton. But on the other hand, this is good, because that means that the expected data in the next couple of years from the experiments will be able to actually either constraint the contribution further, or could even detect it, if it is large enough. At any rate, we now know that we have a sensitive leverage to understand this new contribution.

Unexpected connections

The history of physics is full of stuff developed for one purpose ending up being useful for an entirely different purpose. Quite often they also failed their original purpose miserably, but are paramount for the new one. Newer examples are the first attempts to describe the weak interactions, which ended up describing the strong one. Also, string theory was originally invented for the strong interactions, and failed for this purpose. Now, well, it is the popular science star, and a serious candidate for quantum gravity.

But failing is optional for having a second use. And we just start to discover a second use for our investigations of grand-unified theories. There our research used a toy model. We did this, because we wanted to understand a mechanism. And because doing the full story would have been much too complicated before we did not know, whether the mechanism works. But it turns out this toy theory may be an interesting theory on its own.

And it may be interesting for a very different topic: Dark matter. This is a hypothetical type of matter of which we see a lot of indirect evidence in the universe. But we are still mystified of what it is (and whether it is matter at all). Of course, such mysteries draw our interests like a flame the moth. Hence, our group in Graz starts to push also in this direction, being curious on what is going on. For now, we follow the most probable explanation that there are additional particles making up dark matter. Then there are two questions: What are they? And do they, and if yes how, interact with the rest of the world? Aside from gravity, of course.

Next week I will go to a workshop in which new ideas on dark matter will be explored, to get a better understanding of what is known. And in the course of preparing for this workshop I noted that there is this connection. I will actually present this idea at the workshop, as it forms a new class of possible explanations of dark matter. Perhaps not the right one, but at the current time an equally plausible one as many others.

And here is how it works. Theories of the type of grand-unified theories were for a long time expected to have a lot of massless particles. This was not bad for their original purpose, as we know quite some of them, like the photon and the gluons. However, our results showed that with an improved treatment and shift in paradigm that this is not always true. At least some of them do not have massless particles.

But dark matter needs to be massive to influence stars and galaxies gravitationally. And, except for very special circumstances, there should not be additional massless dark particles. Because otherwise the massive ones could decay into the massless ones. And then the mass is gone, and this does not work. Thus the reason why such theories had been excluded. But with our new results, they become feasible. Even more so, we have a lot of indirect evidence that dark matter is not just a single, massive particle. Rather, it needs to interact with itself, and there could be indeed many different dark matter particles. After all, if there is dark matter, it makes up four times more stuff in the universe than everything we can see. And what we see consists out of many particles, so why should not dark matter do so as well. And this is also realized in our model.

And this is how it works. The scenario I will describe (you can download my talk already now, if you want to look for yourself - though it is somewhat technical) finds two different types of stable dark matter. Furthermore, they interact. And the great thing about our approach is that we can calculate this quite precisely, giving us a chance to make predictions. Still, we need to do this, to make sure that everything works with what astrophysics tells us. Moreover, this setup gives us two more additional particles, which we can couple to the Higgs through a so-called portal. Again, we can calculate this, and how everything comes together. This allows to test this model not only by astronomical observations, but at CERN. This gives the basic idea. Now, we need to do all the detailed calculations. I am quite excited to try this out :) - so stay tuned, whether it actually makes sense. Or whether the model will have to wait for another opportunity.

How to test an idea

As you may have guessed from reading through the blog, our work is centered around a change of paradigm: That there is a very intriguing structure of the Higgs and the W/Z bosons. And that what we observe in the experiments are actually more complicated than what we usually assume. That they are not just essentially point-like objects.

This is a very bold claim, as it touches upon very basic things in the standard model of particle physics. And the interpretation of experiments. However, it is at the same time a necessary consequence if one takes the underlying more formal theoretical foundation seriously. The reason that there is not a huge clash is that the standard model is very special. Because of this both pictures give almost the same prediction for experiments. This can also be understood quantitatively. That is where I have written a review about. It can be imagined in this way:

Thus, the actual particle, which we observe, and call the Higgs is actually a complicated object made from two Higgs particles. However, one of those is so much eclipsed by the other that it looks like just a single one. And a very tiny correction to it.

So far, this does not seem to be something where it is necessary to worry about.

However, there are many and good reasons to believe that the standard model is not the end of particle physics. There are many, many blogs out there, which explain the reasons for this much better than I do. However, our research provides hints that what works so nicely in the standard model, may work much less so in some extensions of the standard model. That there the composite nature makes huge differences for experiments. This was what came out of our numerical simulations. Of course, these are not perfect. And, after all, unfortunately we did not yet discover anything beyond the standard model in experiments. So we cannot test our ideas against actual experiments, which would be the best thing to do. And without experimental support such an enormous shift in paradigm seems to be a bit far fetched. Even if our numerical simulations, which are far from perfect, support the idea. Formal ideas supported by numerical simulations is just not as convincing as experimental confirmation.

So, is this hopeless? Do we have to wait for new physics to make its appearance?

Well, not yet. In the figure above, there was 'something'. So, the ideas make also a statement that even within the standard model there should be a difference. The only question is, what is really the value of a 'little bit'? So far, experiments did not show any deviations from the usual picture. So 'little bit' needs indeed to be really rather small. But we have a calculation prescription for this 'little bit' for the standard model. So, at the very least what we can do is to make a calculation for this 'little bit' in the standard model. We should then see if the value of 'little bit' may already be so large that the basic idea is ruled out, because we are in conflict with experiment. If this is the case, this would raise a lot of question on the basic theory, but well, experiment rules. And thus, we would need to go back to the drawing board, and get a better understanding of the theory.

Or, we get something which is in agreement with current experiment, because it is smaller then the current experimental precision. But then we can make a statement how much better experimental precision needs to become to see the difference. Hopefully the answer will not be so much that it will not be possible within the next couple of decades. But this we will see at the end of the calculation. And then we can decide, whether we will get an experimental test.

Doing the calculations is actually not so simple. On the one hand, they are technically challenging, even though our method for it is rather well under control. But it will also not yield perfect results, but hopefully good enough. Also, it depends strongly on the type of experiment how simple the calculations are. We did a first few steps, though for a type of experiment not (yet) available, but hopefully in about twenty years. There we saw that not only the type of experiment, but also the type of measurement matters. For some measurements the effect will be much smaller than for others. But we are not yet able to predict this before doing the calculation. There, we need still much better understanding of the underlying mathematics. That we will hopefully gain by doing more of these calculations. This is a project I am currently pursuing with a number of master students for various measurements and at various levels. Hopefully, in the end we get a clear set of predictions. And then we can ask our colleagues at experiments to please check these predictions. So, stay tuned.

By the way: This is the standard cycle for testing new ideas and theories. Have an idea. Check that it fits with all existing experiments. And yes, this may be very, very many. If your idea passes this test: Great! There is actually a chance that it can be right. If not, you have to understand why it does not fit. If it can be fixed, fix it, and start again. Or have a new idea. And, at any rate, if it cannot be fixed, have a new idea. When you got an idea which works with everything we know, use it to make a prediction where you get a difference to our current theories. By this you provide an experimental test, which can decide whether your idea is the better one. If yes: Great! You just rewritten our understanding of nature. If not: Well, go back to fix it or have a new idea. Of course, it is best if we have already an experiment which does not fit with our current theories. But there we are at this stage a little short off. May change again. If your theory has no predictions which can be testable in any foreseeable future experimentally. Well, that is a good question how to deal with this, and there is not yet a consensus how to proceed.

How large is an elementary particle?

Recently, in the context of a master thesis, our group has begun to determine the size of the W boson. The natural questions on this project is: Why do you do that? Do we not know it already? And does elementary particles have a size at all?

It is best to answer these questions in reverse order.

So, do elementary particles have a size at all? Well, elementary particles are called elementary as they are the most basic constituents. In our theories today, they start out as pointlike. Only particles made from other particles, so-called bound states like a nucleus or a hadron, have a size. And now comes the but.

First of all, we do not yet know whether our elementary particles are really elementary. They may also be bound states of even more elementary particles. But in experiments we can only determine upper bounds to the size. Making better experiments will reduce this upper bound. Eventually, we may see that a particle previously thought of as point-like has a size. This has happened quite frequently over time. It always opened up a new level of elementary particle theories. Therefore measuring the size is important. But for us, as theoreticians, this type of question is only important if we have an idea about what could be the more elementary particles. And while some of our research is going into this direction, this project is not.

The other issue is that quantum effects give all elementary particles an 'apparent' size. This comes about by how we measure the size of a particle. We do this by shooting some other particle at it, and measure how strongly it becomes deflected. A truly pointlike particle has a very characteristic reflection profile. But quantum effects allow for additional particles to be created and destroyed in the vicinity of any particle. Especially, they allow for the existence of another particle of the same type, at least briefly. We cannot distinguish whether we hit the original particle or one of these. Since they are not at the same place as the original particle, their average distance looks like a size. This gives even a pointlike particle an apparent size, which we can measure. In this sense even an elementary particle has a size.

So, how can we then distinguish this size from an actual size of a bound state? We can do this by calculations. We determine the apparent size due to the quantum fluctuations and compare it to the measurement. Deviations indicate an actual size. This is because for a real bound state we can scatter somewhere in its structure, and not only in its core. This difference looks pictorially like this:

So, do we know the size already? Well, as said, we can only determine upper limits. Searching for them is difficult, and often goes via detours. One of such detours are so-called anomalous couplings. Measuring how they depend on energy provides indirect information on the size. There is an active program at CERN underway to do this experimentally. The results are so far say that the size of the W is below 0.0000000000000001 meter. This seems tiny, but in the world of particle physics this is not that strong a limit.

And now the interesting question: Why do we do this? As written, we do not want to make the W a bound state of something new. But one of our main research topics is driven by an interesting theoretical structure. If the standard model is taken seriously, the particle which we observe in an experiment and call the W is actually not the W of the underlying theory. Rather, it is a bound state, which is very, very similar to the elementary particle, but actually build from the elementary particles. The difference has been so small that identifying one with the other was a very good approximation up to today. But with better and better experiments may change. Thus, we need to test this.

Because then the thing we measure is a bound state it should have a, probably tiny, size. This would be a hallmark of this theoretical structure. And that we understood it. If the size is such that it could be actually measured at CERN, then this would be an important test of our theoretical understanding of the standard model.

However, this is not a simple quantity to calculate. Bound states are intrinsically complicated. Thus, we use simulations for this purpose. In fact, we actually go over the same detour as the experiments, and will determine an anomalous coupling. From this we then infer the size indirectly. In addition, the need to perform efficient simulations forces us to simplify the problem substantially. Hence, we will not get the perfect number. But we may get the order of magnitude, or be perhaps within a factor of two, or so. And this is all we need to currently say whether a measurement is possible, or whether this will have to wait for the next generation of experiments. And thus whether we will know whether we understood the theory within a few years or within a few decades.

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.

A shift in perspective - or: what makes an electron an electron?

We have recently published a new paper. It is based partially on the master thesis of my student Larissa Egger, but involves also another scientist from a different university. In this paper, we look at a quite fundamental question: How do we distinguish the matter particles? What makes an electron an electron and a muon a muon?

In a standard treatment, this identity is just an integral part of the particle. However, results from the late 1970ies and early 1980ies as well as our own research point to a somewhat different direction. I have described the basic idea sometime back. The basic idea back then was that what we perceive as an electron is not really just an electron. It consists itself out of two particles. A Higgs and something I would call a constituent electron. Back then, we were just thinking about how to test this idea.

This took some time.

We thought this was an outrageous question, putting almost certain things into question.

Now we see: Oh, this was just the beginning. And things got more crazy in every step.

But, as a theoretician, if I determine the consequences of a theory, we should not stop because something sounds crazy. Almost everything what we take for granted today, like quantum physics, sounded crazy in the beginning. But if you have reason to believe that a theory is right, then you have to take it seriously. And then its consequences are what they are. Of course, we may just have made an error somewhere. But that remains to be checked, preferably by independent research groups. After all, at some point, it is hard to see the forest for the trees. But so far, we are convinced that we made at most quantitative errors, but no qualitative errors. So the concept appears to us sound. And therefore I keep on writing about it here.

The older works was just the beginning. And we just followed their suggestion to take the standard model of particle physics not only serious, but also literal.

I will start out with the leptons, i.e. electrons, muons, and tauons as well as the three neutrinos. I come back to the quarks later.

The first thing we established was that it is indeed possible to think of particles like the electron as a kind of bound state of other particles, without upsetting what we have measured in experiment. We also gave an estimate what would be necessary to test this statement in an experiment. Though really exact numbers are as always complicated, we believe that the next generation of experiments which use electrons and positrons and collide them could be able to detect difference between the conventional picture and our results. In fact, the way they are currently designed makes them ideally suited to do so. However, they will not provide a measurement before, roughly, 2035 or so. We also understand quite well, why we would need these machines to see the effect. So right now, we will have to sit and wait for this. Keep your fingers crossed that they will be build, if you are interested in the answer.

Naturally, we therefore asked ourselves if there is no alternative. The unfortunate thing is that you will need at least enough energy to copiously produce the Higgs to test this. The only existing machine being able to do so is the LHC at CERN. However, to do so they collide protons. So we had to discuss whether the same effect also occurs for protons. Now a proton is much more complicated than any lepton, because it is already build from quarks and gluons. Still, what we found is the following: If we take the standard model serious as a theory, then a proton cannot be a theoretically well-defined entity if it is only made out of three quarks. Rather, it needs to have some kind of Higgs component. And this should be felt somehow. However, for the same reason as with the lepton, only the LHC could test it. And here comes the problem. Because the proton is made up out of three quarks, it has already a very complicated structure. Furthermore, even at the LHC, the effect of the additional Higgs component will likely be tiny. In fact, the probably best chance to probe it will be if this Higgs component can be linked to the production of the heaviest known quark, the top quark The reason is that the the top quark is so very sensitive to the Higgs. While the LHC indeed produces a lot of top quarks, producing a top quark linked to a Higgs is much harder. Even just the strongest effect has not yet been seen above doubt. And what we find will only be a (likely small) correction to it. There is still a chance, but this will need much more data. But the LHC will keep on running for a long time. So maybe, it will be enough. We will see.

So, this is what we did. In fact, this will all be part of the review I am writing. So, more will be told about this.

If you are still reading, I want to give you some more of the really weird stuff, which came out.

The first is that live is actually even more complicated. Even without all of what I have written about above, there are actually two types of electrons in the standard model. One which is affected by the weak interaction, and one which is not. Other than that, they are the same. They have the same mass, and they are electromagnetically the same. The same is actually true for all leptons and quarks. The matter all around us is actually a mixture of both types. However, the subtle effects I have been talking so far about only affect those which are affected by the weak interaction. There is a technical reason for this (the weak interaction is a so-called gauge symmetry). However, it makes detecting everything more harder, because it only works if we get the 'right' type of an electron.

The second is that electrons and quarks come in three sets of four particles each, the so-called generations or families. The only difference between these copies is the mass. Other than that, there is no difference that we know of. Though we cannot exclude it, but we have no experiment saying otherwise with sufficient confidence. This is one of the central mysteries. It occupies, and keeps occupying, many physicist. Now, we had the following idea: If we provide internal structure to the members of the family - could it be that the different generations are just different arrangements of the internal structure? That such things are in principle possible is known already from atoms. Here, the problem is even more involved, because of the two types of each of the quarks and leptons. This was just a speculation. However, we found that this is, at least logically, possible. Unfortunately, it is yet too complicated to provide definite quantitative prediction how this can be tested. But, at least, it seems to be not at odds with what we know already. If this would be true, this would be a major step in understanding particle physics. But we are still far, far away from this. Still, we are motivated to continue this road.

How to search for dark, unknown things: A bachelor thesis

Today, I would like to write about a recently finished bachelor thesis on the topic of dark matter and the Higgs. Though I will also present the results, the main aim of this entry is to describe an example of such a bachelor thesis in my group. I will try to follow up also in the future with such entries, to give those interested in working in particle physics an idea of what one can do already at a very early stage in one's studies.

The framework of the thesis is the idea that dark matter could interact with the Higgs particle. This is a serious possibility, as both objects are somehow related to mass. There is also not yet any substantial reason why this should not be the case. The unfortunate problem is only: how strong is this effect? Can we measure it, e.g. in the experiments at CERN?

We are looking in a master thesis in the dynamical features of this idea. This is ongoing, and something I will certainly write about later. Knowing the dynamics, however, is only the first step towards connecting the theory to experiment. To do so, we need the basic properties of the theory. This input will then be put through a simulation of what happens in the experiment. Only this result is the one really interesting for experimental physicists. They then look what any kind of imperfections of the experiments change and then they can conclude, whether they will be able to detect something. Or not.

In the thesis, we did not yet had the results from the master student's work, so we parametrized the possible outcomes. This meant mainly to have the mass and the strength of the interaction between the Higgs and the dark matter particle to play around. This gave us what we call an effective theory. Such a theory does not describe every detail, but it is sufficiently close to study a particular aspect of a theory. In this case how dark matter should interact with the Higgs at the CERN experiments.

With this effective theory, it was then possible to use simulations of what happens in the experiment. Since dark matter cannot, as the name says, be directly seen, we needed somehow a marker to say that it has been there. For that purpose we choose the so-called associate production mode.

We knew that the dark matter would escape the experiment undetected. In jargon, this is called missing energy, since we miss the energy of the dark matter particles, when we account for all we see. Since we knew what went in, and know that what goes in must come out, anything not accounted for must have been carried away by something we could not directly see. To make sure that this came from an interaction with the Higgs we needed a tracer that a Higgs had been involved. The simplest solution was to require that there is still a Higgs. Also, there are deeper reasons which require that dark matter in this theory should not only arrive with a Higgs particle, but should be obtained also from a Higgs particle before the emission of the dark matter particles. The simplest way to check for this is that there is besides the Higgs in the end also a so-called Z-boson, for technical reasons. Thus, we had what we called a signature: Look for a Higgs, a Z-boson, and missing energy.

There is, however, one unfortunate thing in known particle physics which makes this more complicated: neutrinos. These particles are also essentially undetectable for an experiment at the LHC. Thus, when produced, they will also escape undetected as missing energy. Since we do not detect either dark matter or neutrinos, we cannot decide, what actually escaped. Unfortunately, the tagging with the Higgs and the Z do not help, as neutrinos can also be produced together with them. This is what we call a background to our signal. Thus, it was necessary to account for this background.

Fortunately, there are experiments which can detect, with a lot of patience, neutrinos. They are very different from the one we at the LHC. But they gave us a lot of information on neutrinos. Hence, we knew how often neutrinos would be produced in the experiment. So, we would only need to remove this known background from what the simulation gives. Whatever is left would then be the signal of dark matter. If the remainder would be large enough, we would be able to see the dark matter in the experiment. Of course, there are many subtleties involved in this process, which I will skip.

So the student simulated both cases, and determined the signal strength. From that she could deduce that the signal grows quickly with the strength of the interaction. She also found that the signal became stronger if the dark matter particles become lighter. That is so because there is only a finite amount of energy available to produce them. But the more energy is left to make the dark matter particles move the easier it gets to produce them, an effect known in physics as phase space. In addition, she found that if the dark matter particles have half the mass of the Higgs their production became also very efficient. The reason is a resonance. Just like two noises amplify each other if they are at the same frequency, so such amplifications can happen in particle physics.

The final outcome of the bachelor thesis was thus telling us for the values of the two parameters of the effective theory how strong our signal would be. Once we know these values from our microscopic theory in the master project, we know whether we have a chance to see these particles in this type of experiments.

Digging into a particle

This time I would like to write about a new paper which I have just put out. In this paper, I investigate a particular class of particles.

This class of particles is actually quite similar to the Higgs boson. I. e. the particles are bosons and they have the same spin as the Higgs boson. This spin is zero. This class of particles is called scalars. These particular sclars also have the same type of charges, they interact with the weak interaction.

But there are fundamental differences as well. One is that I have switched off the back reaction between these particles and the weak interactions: The scalars are affected by the weak interaction, but they do not influence the W and Z bosons. I have also switched off the interactions between the scalars. Therefore, no Brout-Englert-Higgs effect occurs. On the other hand, I have looked at them for several different masses. This set of conditions is known as quenched, because all the interactions are shut-off (quenched), and the only feature which remains to be manipulated is the mass.

Why did I do this? There are two reasons.

One is a quite technical reason. Even in this quenched situation, the scalars are affected by quantum corrections, the radiative corrections. Due to them, the mass changes, and the way the particles move changes. These effects are quantitative. And this is precisely the reason to study them in this setting. Being quenched it is much easier to actually determine the quantitative behavior of these effects. Much easier than when looking at the full theory with back reactions, which is a quite important part of our research. I have learned a lot about these quantitative effects, and am now much more confident in how they behave. This will be very valuable in studies beyond this quenched case. As was expected, there was not many surprises found. Hence, it was essentially a necessary but unspectacular numerical exercise.

Much more interesting was the second aspect. When quenching, this theory becomes very different from the normal standard model. Without the Brout-Englert-Higgs effect, the theory actually looks very much like the strong interaction. Especially, in this case the scalars would be confined in bound states, just like quarks are in hadrons. How this occurs is not really understood. I wanted to study this using these scalars.

Justifiable, you may ask why I would do this. Why would I not just have a look at the quarks themselves. There is a conceptual and a technical reason. The conceptual reason is that quarks are fermions. Fermions have non-zero spin, in contrast to scalars. This entails that they are mathematically more complicated. These complications mix in with the original question about confinement. This is disentangled for scalars. Hence, by choosing scalars, these complications are avoided. This is also one of the reasons to look at the quenched case. The back-reaction, irrespective of with quarks or scalars, obscures the interesting features. Thus, quenching and scalars isolates the interesting feature.

The other is that the investigations were performed using simulations. Fermions are much, much more expensive than scalars in such simulations in terms of computer time. Hence, with scalars it is possible to do much more at the same expense in computing time. Thus, simplicity and cost made scalars for this purpose attractive.

Did it work? Well, no. At least not in any simple form. The original anticipation was that confinement should be imprinted into how the scalars move. This was not seen. Though the scalars are very peculiar in their properties, they in no obvious way show confinement. It may still be that there is an indirect way. But so far nobody has any idea how. Though disappointing, this is not bad. It only tells us that our simple ideas were wrong. It also requires us to think harder on the problem.

An interesting observation could be made nonetheless. As said above, the scalars were investigated for different masses. These masses are, in a sense, not the observed masses. What they really are is the mass of the particle before quantum effects are taken into account. These quantum effects change the mass. These changes were also measured. Surprisingly, the measured mass was larger than the input mass. The interactions created mass, even if the input mass was zero. The strong interaction is known to do so. However, it was believed that this feature is strongly tied to fermions. For scalars it was not expected to happen, at least not in the observed way. Actually, the mass is even of a similar size as for the quarks. This is surprising. This implies that the kind of interaction is generically introducing a mass scale.

This triggered for me the question whether the mass scale also survives when having the backcoupling in once more. If it remains even when there is a Brout-Englert-Higgs effect then this could have interesting implications for the mass of the Higgs. But this remains to be seen. It may as well be that this will not endure when not being quenched.

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.

Touching dark matter with the Higgs

Some time ago, I have written about my growing interest in dark matter. Now, both a master student and a bachelor student have actually started working on this topic. Thus, I want to describe this time what they are exactly working on.

As told, we know actually very little about what dark matter is. Especially, we know very little about how it interacts with the rest of the universe, except for gravity. If you do not want to assume that this is the only way dark matter shows its there, you have therefore to guess. Luckily, the number of guesses is somewhat limited by experiment and observation.

One interesting possibility is that dark matter is actually only interacting additionally with the Higgs. Theories of this type are called Higgs-Portal models, because the Higgs is the portal through which we see dark matter. Such models have some nice features. Probably the nicest is that there is a good chance that the LHC will be able to access through this portal dark matter. This idea has received much more attention since we know that there is a Higgs. Thus, a lot of investigations have been performed already. So what do we want to add?

Here enters a second observation about dark matter. Today, we have become pretty good at observing dark matter indirectly through its gravitational action on galaxies. From this, people have indirectly deduced that dark matter can interact with itself. Especially, it seems quite possible that it interacts very strongly with itself. Thus, while dark matter is very reclusive, it still forms in its reclusion a very active world.

Now, comes the new part. Essentially all of the previous investigations of Higgs-portal models assumed that dark matter is not strongly self-interacting. Therefore they used perturbation theory, which is then the adequate language. To capture the effects of strong interactions requires a different method. We will employ numerical simulations to deal with them. However, we will reduce, for the sake of computing time, the problem somewhat. We keep only the Higgs, the W and Z, and the dark matter particle. This is still a formidable problem.

The topic of the master thesis is now to perform these simulations. The goal of them are the following: How much do the strong interactions of the dark matter particle imprint on the Higgs and the W and the Z? Are their properties changed? If yes, how strong can the dark matter self-interaction be before they are changed too strongly, i.e. before they do no longer agree with our experimental knowledge? What are the properties of the dark matter particles? How strongly can the Higgs and the dark matter particle communicate through the portal before the Higgs becomes changed? In this context, how is the structure of the Higgs affected? These are the most important questions, which need answers.

However, with this we will very much understand the theoretical aspects. But this is not enough. If there is some interesting effect in principle, this by no means guarantees that we can see it in an experiment. On the one hand, there is also still the rest of the standard model. Do they interfere? And then, if they do not, are the effects of dark matter reduced so strongly in a real experiment that we ca no longer see it? Especially, can we still see anything of the strong self-interaction?

Herein lies the goal of the bachelor student. We can, unfortunately, not simulate the whole standard model and the experiment. But we can encode it into an effective theory, which we then can treat sufficiently well. This is again a combination of methods which I do so often. Using this effective model, and a toolbox created by other people, a so-called Monte-Carlo generator, she can make predictions for an actual experiment. This can be either the LHC, or one of the planned next experiments. That should give us at least a rough idea, whether we can see something of the dark matter. Or, if we are lucky, a very good idea.

This also demonstrates how different projects, and the work of several people, feed into each other. I am quite curious what will come out, and what we will learn about strongly-interacting dark matter.

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.

Looking for one thing in another

One of the most powerful methods to learn about particle physics is to smash two particles against each other at high speed. This is what is currently done at the LHC, where two protons are used. Protons have the advantage that they are simple to handle on an engineering level, but since they are made up out of quarks andgluons, these collisions are rather messy.

An alternative are colliders using electrons and positrons. There have been many of these used successfully in the past. The reason is that the electrons and positrons appear at first sight to be elementary, but are technically much harder to use. Nonetheless, there are right now two large projects planned to use them, one in Japan and one in China. The decision is still out, whether either, or both, will be build, but they would both open up a new view on particle physics. These would start, hopefully, in the (late) 2020ies or early 2030ies.

However, they may be a little more messier than currently expected. I have written previously several times about our research on the structure of the Higgs particle. Especially that the Higgs may be much less simpler than just a singleparticle. We are currently working on possible consequences of this insight.

What has this to do with the collisions? Well, already 35 years ago people figured out that if the statements about the Higgs are true, then this has further implications. Especially, the electrons as we know them cannot be really elementary particles. Rather, they have to be bound states, a combination of what we usually call an electron and a Higgs.

This is confusing at first sight: An electron should consists out of an electron and something else? The reason is that a clear distinction is often not made. But one should be more precise. One should first think of an elementary 'proper' electron. Together with the Higgs this proper electron creates a bound state. This bound state is what we perceive and usually call an electron. But it is different from the proper electron. Thus, we should therefore call it rather an 'effective' electron. This chaos is not so much different as what you would get when you would call a hydrogen atom also proton, since the electron is such a small addition to the proton in the atom. That you do not do so has a historical origin, as it has in the reverse way for the (effective) electron. Yes, it is confusing.

Even after mastering this confusion, that seems to be a rather outrageous statement. The Higgs is so much heavier than the electron, how can that be? Well, field theory indeed allows to have a bound state of two particles which is much, much lighter than the two individual particles. This effect is called a mass defect. This has been measured for atoms and nuclei, but there this is a very small effect. So, it is in principle possible. Still, the enormous size of the effect makes this a very surprising statement.

What we want to do now is to find some way to confirm this picture using experiments. And confirm this extreme mass defect.

Unfortunately, we cannot disassemble the bound state. But the presence of the Higgs can be seen in a different way. When we collide such bound states hard enough, then we usually have the situation that we actually collide from each bound states just one of the elements, rather than the whole thing. In a simple picture, in most cases one of the parts will be in the front of the collision, and will take the larger part of the hit.

This means that sometimes we will collide the conventional part, the proper electron. Then everything looks as usually expected. But sometimes we will do something involving the Higgs from either or both bound states. We can estimate already that anything involving the Higgs will be very rare. In the simple picture above, the Higgs, being much heavier than the proper electron, mostly drags behind the proper electron. But 'rarer' is no quantitative enough in physics. Therefore we have to do now calculations. This is a project I intend to do now with a new master student.

We want to do this, since we want to predict whether the aforementioned next experiments we will be sensitive enough to see that some times we actually collide the Higgses. That would confirm the idea of bound states. Then, we would indeed find something else than people were originally been looking for. Or expecting.

What is so important (to me) about the Higgs?

In a few weeks, I will give my inaugural lecture at the University of Graz. I have entitled it "The Higgs as a touchstone of theoretical particle physics". Of course, with this title I could easily give a lecture on many of the problems the Higgs present us with which are begging for new physics. I could write about how we have no idea why the Higgs has a mass of the size it has. How we do not understand why it does what it does. And so many other things.

But this is not what I want to write about. Nor is it what i want to talk about. It is rather something more mundane but also much more subtle. It is something for which I do not need any new physics to worry about. I can very well worry just about the known physics.

It has something to do with redundancy. In theoretical physics it is often very convenient - well, often indispensable - to add something redundant in our description. A redundancy is like writing instead of 2 2+0. Both statements have the same meaning. But adding zero to two is redundant. In this example, the zero is just redundant, but not useful. In particle physics, what we add is both redundant and useful.

It is this redundancy which helps us disentangling complicated problems. Of course, we are not allowed to change something by introducing the redundancy. But as long as we respect this requirement, we are pretty free what kind of redundancy we add. In the previous example, we could just write 2+0+0, and have another version of redundancy.

OK, so what has this to do with the Higgs? Well, if we measure something, it is of course independent of these redundancies - after all, they are man-made. And nothing made by us should influence what we measure. But if we look at the ordinary version of how we describe the Higgs, than there is a slight mismatch. In our theoretical description of the Higgs, there is some remainder of the redundancy still lingering. It is, like 2+0.001 pops up. Nonetheless, our theoretical description of the Higgs is spot on the experimental results. But how can this be if there is still redundancy polluting our result? It is this where the Higgs becomes a touchstone of understanding theoretical particle physics: In explaining why this is not correct and correct at the same time.

As always, the answer appears to be in the fine-print. In the standard way how we approach the Higgs, we are not doing it exactly. Well, to be honest, we could not do it exactly. We make some approximations. The consequences of these approximations is the appearance of the residual redundancy. Since our calculations are so spot on, these approximations appear to be good. However, after performing these approximations, we have now way short of experiment to confirm our approximations. That is highly unsatisfactory. We must be able to do it such that we can predict whether the approximations work. And understand why they work. It is in this sense that the Higgs is a touchstone. If we are not even able to answer these questions, how can we expect to solve the many outstanding questions?

This question has bugged people already 35 years ago, and some understanding of why it works was achieved. But not of when it works, at least not in the form of numbers. We have made some progress with this, especially recently. The amazing result was that it appears to work only in a very limited range of masses of the Higgs - with the observed Higgs mass essentially right in the middle of the possible range. This is even more surprising as already slight modifications of how many Higgs particles there are seem to change this. So, why is this so? Why is the Higgs mass just there? And what would happen otherwise? Understanding these questions will be very important to go beyond what is known. Without understanding, we may easily be fooled by our approximations, if we are not that lucky next time. This is the reason, why I think the Higgs is a touchstone for theoretical particle physics.

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.