No Higgs is good Higgs! - What if there is no Higgs boson?
I bring to your attention a translation of a recent post from the blog of Quantum Diaries by Pauline Gagnon . I hope it will help to dispel disputes about the need to build a 27-km colossus and the lack of results so far. In addition, I invite those who wish to join LHC @ home and contribute to the appearance of these very results.
Much has been said about the Higgs boson - mainly how cool it would be to find it. But what if we never find him? In fact, and it will be a great discovery.
Finding the Higgs boson or refuting the theory of its existence will be equally useful, as Rolf Heuer, president of CERN ( “CERN Director General” - head of a non-profit organization ) reminded the audience of the recent conference of the International Europhysics Conference of High Energy Physics . Any result will bring pleasure: after all, the work is done! But the exclusion of the Higgs boson (or at least one of the species predicted by the Standard Model - our current theoretical model) will direct theorists in the right direction. After all, we need not so much the Higgs boson, as such, how much understanding, how it all works.
')
The Higgs boson is the simplest resolution of the Brut-Engert-Higgs mechanism ( process ) ( or simply the Higgs mechanism ) - a mathematical trick named after the scientists who developed it. This is what we need in order to provide with mass all elementary particles (electrons, quarks and all heavy bosons that we observed here at CERN or elsewhere - namely, the W and Z bosons). Without this mechanism, the equations by which we currently describe elementary particles generate only massless particles. But we know that these particles have a mass, which is confirmed countless times in our detectors.
The Higgs mechanism also solves another fundamental problem of unitarity violation. In a nutshell, “unitarity” in this context means the normalization of all probabilities by one. Imagine a bag with balls of three different colors. Suppose 20% are red and 50% are yellow. And I am not obliged to call you the remainder of the green balls, which are 30%. Everyone can guess this. But if normalization is violated, the green balls may not be 30% and the total will not be 100%. You might think that our balls rolled behind the rollers ( in the original, the word game “marble” and “losing marbles” is used here ).
This is exactly what happens with all possible paths of particle decay when we consider them at high energies. The Brut-Englert-Higgs mechanism stabilizes this situation and brings minimal sanity to it. Without it, all known equations that describe the world of elementary particles stop working.
Therefore, theorists are so confident that we are on the verge of discovering something new in the Large Hadron Collider. This new accelerator is powerful enough to lead to an energy regime when equations start to break. Thus, we are on the verge of discovering new particles related to areas of the theory that we have not yet had the opportunity to study. They are necessary to stabilize the theoretical framework by which we describe nature. We know that something is missing, but we do not know too much what this “something” can be.
Now there are many models that comply with the normalization and explain the origin of the mass. This is not necessarily the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. He just - the simplest explanation. It could be something more complicated, like “Technicolor” (models that refer to the symmetry breaking of the electroweak interaction) or additional measurements. There are many such theories, we just have to move in the right direction. And what we discover with our detectors will reveal which theory was correct.
The discovery of the Higgs boson or its non-discovery will tell us where to go.
And, by tradition,
The question “what about Habr?” Has already been asked and qrazydraqon answered it even better than me :
qrazydraqon #
The people take part in the work of LHC @ home (that's for sure IT, right?), And he, of course, wonders if he is not wasted. This is [moderately] a detailed explanation that, regardless of the final answer, the result will be extremely useful for science.
nagimov #
It seems to me more clearly to show that the energy of 7 TeV is approximately equal to the kinetic energy of a flying fly =)
sly2m #
But I still think that dark matter exists.
Here at the expense of dark energy - it is the elusive Einstein lambda member, yes, my thoughts are exactly the same as yours about dark matter. It seems to me that dark energy, which is so necessary for modern astrophysicists, to whose mass they currently believe 70% of the mass of the Universe is a manifestation of some (further, figurative, "unscientific" terms) effect of space curvature on gigantic scales, or manifestation of some kind of law or force nature, acting on the scale of galaxies, and us, so far, completely immeasurable.
sly2m #
In "comparable size" is mildly said. According to modern concepts, visible matter is only 4% of the total mass of the Universe. Dark matter is 22%, and dark energy is 74%.
[...]
I also think something is wrong here. None other than the authorities hide the unrecorded matter from the population ...
alexkolzov #
But I do not really believe in the correctness of Hicks theory. In general, despite my great love for quantum mechanics, the Standard Model contains an incredibly large (in my opinion) number of elementary particles. It is hard to believe that nature is so complex at a fundamental level.
alexkolzov #
[...]
And regarding the location - so the particles, in fact, usually do not "find" directly, they are calculated based on the principles of conservation and symmetry.
Much has been said about the Higgs boson - mainly how cool it would be to find it. But what if we never find him? In fact, and it will be a great discovery.
Finding the Higgs boson or refuting the theory of its existence will be equally useful, as Rolf Heuer, president of CERN ( “CERN Director General” - head of a non-profit organization ) reminded the audience of the recent conference of the International Europhysics Conference of High Energy Physics . Any result will bring pleasure: after all, the work is done! But the exclusion of the Higgs boson (or at least one of the species predicted by the Standard Model - our current theoretical model) will direct theorists in the right direction. After all, we need not so much the Higgs boson, as such, how much understanding, how it all works.
')
The Higgs boson is the simplest resolution of the Brut-Engert-Higgs mechanism ( process ) ( or simply the Higgs mechanism ) - a mathematical trick named after the scientists who developed it. This is what we need in order to provide with mass all elementary particles (electrons, quarks and all heavy bosons that we observed here at CERN or elsewhere - namely, the W and Z bosons). Without this mechanism, the equations by which we currently describe elementary particles generate only massless particles. But we know that these particles have a mass, which is confirmed countless times in our detectors.
The Higgs mechanism also solves another fundamental problem of unitarity violation. In a nutshell, “unitarity” in this context means the normalization of all probabilities by one. Imagine a bag with balls of three different colors. Suppose 20% are red and 50% are yellow. And I am not obliged to call you the remainder of the green balls, which are 30%. Everyone can guess this. But if normalization is violated, the green balls may not be 30% and the total will not be 100%. You might think that our balls rolled behind the rollers ( in the original, the word game “marble” and “losing marbles” is used here ).
This is exactly what happens with all possible paths of particle decay when we consider them at high energies. The Brut-Englert-Higgs mechanism stabilizes this situation and brings minimal sanity to it. Without it, all known equations that describe the world of elementary particles stop working.
Therefore, theorists are so confident that we are on the verge of discovering something new in the Large Hadron Collider. This new accelerator is powerful enough to lead to an energy regime when equations start to break. Thus, we are on the verge of discovering new particles related to areas of the theory that we have not yet had the opportunity to study. They are necessary to stabilize the theoretical framework by which we describe nature. We know that something is missing, but we do not know too much what this “something” can be.
Now there are many models that comply with the normalization and explain the origin of the mass. This is not necessarily the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. He just - the simplest explanation. It could be something more complicated, like “Technicolor” (models that refer to the symmetry breaking of the electroweak interaction) or additional measurements. There are many such theories, we just have to move in the right direction. And what we discover with our detectors will reveal which theory was correct.
The discovery of the Higgs boson or its non-discovery will tell us where to go.
And, by tradition,
important comments
The question “what about Habr?” Has already been asked and qrazydraqon answered it even better than me :
qrazydraqon #
The people take part in the work of LHC @ home (that's for sure IT, right?), And he, of course, wonders if he is not wasted. This is [moderately] a detailed explanation that, regardless of the final answer, the result will be extremely useful for science.
nagimov #
It seems to me more clearly to show that the energy of 7 TeV is approximately equal to the kinetic energy of a flying fly =)
sly2m #
But I still think that dark matter exists.
Here at the expense of dark energy - it is the elusive Einstein lambda member, yes, my thoughts are exactly the same as yours about dark matter. It seems to me that dark energy, which is so necessary for modern astrophysicists, to whose mass they currently believe 70% of the mass of the Universe is a manifestation of some (further, figurative, "unscientific" terms) effect of space curvature on gigantic scales, or manifestation of some kind of law or force nature, acting on the scale of galaxies, and us, so far, completely immeasurable.
sly2m #
In "comparable size" is mildly said. According to modern concepts, visible matter is only 4% of the total mass of the Universe. Dark matter is 22%, and dark energy is 74%.
[...]
I also think something is wrong here. None other than the authorities hide the unrecorded matter from the population ...
alexkolzov #
But I do not really believe in the correctness of Hicks theory. In general, despite my great love for quantum mechanics, the Standard Model contains an incredibly large (in my opinion) number of elementary particles. It is hard to believe that nature is so complex at a fundamental level.
alexkolzov #
[...]
And regarding the location - so the particles, in fact, usually do not "find" directly, they are calculated based on the principles of conservation and symmetry.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/126523/
All Articles