Later today, there’ll be a joint seminar by physicists from ATLAS and CMS, the two experimental halls at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) looking for evidence of the Higgs boson. This will be the first official announcement of the physics seen (or not seen) by the combined results from both independent searches. Neither search has enough data to announce a discovery of anything (as far as I’ve heard) and the combined results would not constitute one either, but people are hoping for at least some nice hints of something suggestive that support each other. We shall see! this is an exciting time, as you’ve read me say before, and so I recommend looking out for what will be announced. Even a negative result (e.g., “we’ve found nothing yet”) will be interesting, since the harder the Higgs hides, the more interesting the physics might be that is hiding it from appearing as straightforwardly as might have been expected (unless we are really, really unlucky…).
Press release here. More at two blogs, Quantum Diaries and Resonaances. The former (Pauline Gagnon’s post) points to various live sources that will be available, including her tweets.
…and look here for Flip Tanedo’s “The Night Before Higgsmas”.
-cvj
Cheers for the delightful clutter nc.
-cvj
Weinberg mixing and its the Weinberg mixing angle relationship between weak boson masses doesn’t imply explicit symmetry breaking or a Higgs mechanism. Cheers for deleting the crucial quotations Clifford.
Hi,
I had to cut out the unnecessary quoted material from your comment and left the part that directly addresses your thoughts and question.
There are tight internal constraints from quantum field theory that tell us that the Higgs or something that plays the role of the Higgs is present. Don’t forget that we have seen the results of the Higgs mechanism -its precise predictions- already… The Ws and Z, the patterns of particle masses, etc…
-cvj
[snip! long quotes removed for brevity -cvj]
Hi Clifford! It seems that you’re sure that if the LHC finds nothing, then that means the Higgs must be hiding very hard? Would you concede maybe, just maybe, the difficulty finding it could just be that there is no massive Nambu-Goldstone boson?
Some people think that this is just too uneducated, ignorant, and stupid to be possible? But doubts have been expressed about whether the electroweak symmetry is real (if it’s not real and not explicitly broken, there’s no Higgs boson needed for the electroweak sector of the SM at least). The problem is that if some stupid little upstart happens to find a correction years ago that is then suppressed by status quo, when eventually the LHC produces a “Higgs boson” which confirms people’s prejudices, he might go crazy. Or is that not a problem?
Cheers!