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By Hamish Johnston
“Beyond any reasonable doubt, it is a Higgs boson, and here we examine the extent to which its couplings resemble those of the single Higgs boson of the Standard Model.”
That’s taken from the abstract of a new paper by John Ellis and Tevong You of King’s College London. Ellis, of course, has been associated with CERN for decades and if he says it’s a Higgs that’s good enough for me!
But what about the second part of that sentence – are the couplings of the particle discovered at the LHC those of a Standard Model Higgs?
The equation below says it all:
In this context µ is a measure of how closely the decay of the Higgs via several decay channels (or couplings) resembles that expected of a Higgs Boson described by the Standard Model. A Standard Model Higgs should have a value of one, and the µ calculated using data from the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments is well within that value.
That said, Ellis and You have not completely given up on hints of physics beyond the Standard Model. They point out that the mass and couplings of the Higgs still leave the door open to supersymmetry.
The LHC and its experiments are now shut down for a major upgrade – and you may be wondering if there is any important information about the Higgs still lurking in the existing data? Ellis and You seem to be saying no, writing that the previous run “has now yielded most of its Higgs secrets, and we look forward to the next LHC run at higher energy, and its later runs at significantly higher luminosity”.
If you are in need of regular Higgs updates, you could be in for two or more years of cold turkey.
That doesn’t square with material I’ve read by other physicists, or the physicsworld article Reality check at the LHC, or the NS Particle Headache article featuring this:
“The minimal standard model Higgs is like a fairy tale,” says Guido Altarelli of CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. “It is a toy model to make the theory match the data, a crutch to allow the standard model to walk a bit further until something better comes along.”
The SM as a powerful effective model is/has been on lucid and strong crutches for more than two decades inspite of quite a few preliminary results going beyond its reach and then falling back into its fold without any plaintive murmur. And as the Higgs boson represents a component of the vector, whose other components produced the bosons of the electroweak interatction, it is in the nature of things, it is going to be the SM scalar boson. However, let us finish the study of most of its decay channels for its slot without worrying about the fairy-tale festival played around.
It may be a good news based on results for 5 decay channels of this Higgs-like particle for both the Atlas and CMS instruments out of around 15 possible ones even though the remaining channels have low production probilities. They may not throw up any surprise, but they have to be ploughed through before crowning the SM Higgs.
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This just doesn’t square with what I’ve been reading elsewhere, such as the New Scientist “Particle Headache” article which quotes CERN physicists.
The Higgs boson adds nothing to the SM but it serves one of proofs of the new general theory of physics and much beyond.
The problem of superunification of fields and interactions has been resolved in complete.
Just visit my website http://WWW.superunifed.org launched recently. To the end of reading articles there you will be enabled to compute any natural phenomena including human genetics.
It is almost sure that this Higgs is the SM scalar boson and fills its slot waiting for it for years.
It’s not very interesting any more to comment on the cascade of articles we see on the Higgs. If you have read many of them you would get the impression, because of the messy situation, that clearly the Higgs does not exist, but something else. Cern for the time being is adamant: It may not be THE Higgs but A Higgs. All that is not satisfactory. For my part my greatest worry since I wrote my first comment on the Higgs last year in The Economist, I still am even more convinced that the Higgs creates a huge problem. If science goes on and on with it we can say Adieu to any chance of making smooth progress towards elucidating the ultimate realities of the universe and of existence. Because whatever is mass, it is crucial in unraveling our ultimate origin and our realities. The Higgs Mechanism of Higgs goes diametrically against the possibility of ultimately understanding quantum theory and uncertainty, quantum consciousness, why C is constant for observers in different inertial frames, why we have molecules,life, evolution and how the universe was created and what is time.One thing about which I am certain our origin was not an amorphous singularity, it was not a characterless vacuum fluctuation, while the statistical zillions of universes should be immediately discarded, particulary since we do not appear to be able to understand the realities of the one where we have existed for ages.
Peerally,if you worry about the SM scalar Higgs boson, we are almost there as its most significant decay channels have been harvested out and the remaining less probable channels will be looked into in the near future. Moreover, this work cannot be an obstacle to your other preoccupations, because it has to be an important element in the general matrix of things in nature. Finally, you have to realise, this work is the result of a very hard and devoted work over years on the ground and not just due to a comment whatever, its seriousness, in a journal.
Asghar, my worry is not about the existence of the Higgs but about the contributions of physical concepts to elucidating the much sought after realities of the universe. I sincerely believe that getting our comprehension of certain concepts like relativity, mass, matter, gravitational attraction etc right will decide whether we will in due course better understand the basis of what is consciousness and all the benefits which will accrue from such work. I don’t see all these possibilities happen if mass were to be due to the Higgs mechanism. Its not a worry but an apprehension about science.
Numbers are the Supreme Court of science. However Godel proved that we may not prove everything. Physics needs numbers. There must be Physics Foibles!! Is the standard model dead ??
Mr Goldstein,
Mein Gott, at least one realistic man lives on the Globe. Of course,numbers are the Supreme Court of science. Of course, physics needs numbers. And you have now got those numbers in the super unified theory of quantum fields and fundamental interactions.However, it is not that the Standard model is dead; yes, it is awkward, yet, the experimental and partly theoretical data accumulated in this framework are true and as such SM has a brilliant theoretical continuation.What dies is the whole mathematical method of theoretical physics. Computer simulate the absolute geometry of space-time and matter and derive this way the genuine revolutionary technologies of the future. Just don’t be too late to profit from any final theory. Critical tendencies of our times can become irreversible a catastrophe within a much shorter time period than it seems to the political and scientific elite.