Hopeful sign of the future*?
There could be other store names of this sort breaking out depending upon what is found at the LHC and the ILC. You could have the “Superpartners” dating agency, for one, and perhaps “Dark Matter” chocolate bars (made by same company that brought you “Milky Way”, of course), as another… the possibilities are endless.
-cvj
(*For the uninitiated, the Higgs particle is one of the things physicists will search for at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, in an effort to understand better the world of elementary particles. Remarkably, they (or something like them) impart mass to the particles that we observe making up everything else. Models that involve a symmetry of nature called “supersymmetry” typically call for at least a pair of Higgs particles. Finding supersymmetry (which combines various particles with other particles, making them “superpartners”) would be simply marvellous, for lots of technical and aesthetic reasons. This explains, I hope, my amusement at the sign. [Note that the LHC is not really designed to study supersymmetry extensively. If it sees signs of this phenomenon, we’d have to wait for a new machine (like the International Linear Collider (ILC)) to be built.] Other particles implied by the existence of supersymmetry are candidates for the huge amount of missing matter called “Dark Matter” in our Universe. This, I hope, explains my other choice of names above. Once again, my explanation is longer than the actual bit of humour itself. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.)
Hi Clifford,
Thanks! Briefly this time, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson says the Higgs expectation value is 246 GeV, ie, simply an e-fold increase on the Z boson mass of 91 GeV, ie, Z bosons start to appear at 91 GeV. If they’re being generated by scatter reactions in the Dirac sea/vacuum, they become abundant and dominant in electric interactions (weak force effects) after transversing one mean free path, ie, an energy increase by the factor e. Hence the electroweak symmetry is broken by Z boson effects around the Higgs expectation value!
Mass is provided to all fermions by Z bosons: empirical evidence at links on https://nige.wordpress.com/ Fermions are monopolar electric field sources, but a Maxwellian boson is an electric field dipole; one complete wave cycle (one photon) in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Light-wave.png contains positive electric field at one end and negative at the other. This means that slower than light (massive) Z bosons can be polarized like dipolar molecules, by just rotating. Gravity is the very weak residual electric field effect between dipolar bosons. For a fermion to have mass, it couples to massive bosons.
Best,
nc
Surely the Higgs boson(s) is/are not as detailed a scientific prediction as the neutrino? Pauli and Fermi were able to work out the properties of neutrinos and make precise predictions about its energy, detection etc (the energy of the neutrino or rather antineutrino is the difference between total transition energy and the energy of the beta particle).
The Higgs field sounds very nice to someone wanting causal mechanism to understand what is going on, until you see that a single Higgs boson would apparently be problematic.
[… snip….. cvj. (nc may later provide us with a link to his longer thoughts and quotes.)]
Just one small nip: please don’t have Dark Matter chocolate bars made by the Mars Company. Among the branding of bad chocolate products (nearly all of which are exclusively made in the US–the bad ones that is) Mars is noticeably worse than Hershey, and neither are worth paying for. Then there is this crisis:
California is the leading maker of chocolate products in the US? That alone could be one of the scariest things i discover this Halloween. Maybe there is a good local chocolateer near you, where you could start making Dark Matter bars. And NO!, not the Sees Company. Indeed you could have a entire line created (similar to the endangered species chocolate bars) of physics oriented confections.
I have a quick question about the LHC: Is there a particular date when it’s scheduled to turn on for the first time? Or has it been run many times already for testing purposes?
I only ask because I want to celebrate when it starts collecting data. 🙂
Isn’t there a “G” missing?
Have you ever read The Real Inspector Hound? by Tom Stoppard?
It’s a play where one of the central questions — which is asked repeatedly throughout the first part of the play — is “Where’s Higgs?” (Of course, Higgs is a drama critic whose second-string replacement has shown up for a play, not a fundamental field, but, hey, what can you say?)
-Rob
Excellent. I will name drop a bit here since back in the 80s Higgs was my undergraduate studies supervisor/tutor who I saw once a week or very fortnight for an hour. He would buy the coffee and would then pontificate on physics, with the rain battering the windows usually. Nice memory and a lovely man (apart from some of his exams:) So I am going to have to hope the LHC turns up the standard textbook Higgs and that it really is the mechanism underpinning electroweak symmetry breaking. Verification of supersymmetry would be incredible too.