Proof Evidence of “God Particle” Found

Posted on July 2, 2012 by woit

Besides the Daily Mail, the AP is now reporting Proof of “God Particle” Found. They include the caveat:

But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren’t quite ready to say they’ve “discovered” the particle…

Senior CERN scientists say that the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN’s vast complex on the Swiss-French border on July 4 are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one…

Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: “Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery,” and he thinks it is a hair’s breadth away.

which suggests that neither CMS nor ATLAS have quite managed to reach the 5 sigma threshold, and CERN remains dedicated to not discussing the obvious result of combining the data.

The AP report also has:

CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday, however, that he would be “very cautious” about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data. “Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday,” he told AP.

From everything I’ve heard, my impression is that the reason no official combination is being produced is not because it would be technically impossible to do so on a time-scale of days, but because the decision not to do such a combination for ICHEP was made for reasons described here. The problem with this is that it may lead to a lot of confusing explanations like this in the AP report, which muddles how particle physics experiments are done and the obscure issue of 5 sigma/experiment or in combination:

experts familiar with the research at CERN’s vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson — all but proving it exists — but doesn’t allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed…

Roser compared the results that scientists are preparing to announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: “You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don’t actually see it.”

Better for CERN to just announce discovery and break open the champagne…

Update: Weird. The AP seems to have changed their title from “Proof” to “Evidence”. This may be the first time in history that a media headline about particle physics is incorrectly pessimistic (“Evidence” usually means a 3-sigma signal, which existed last December, “Proof” would be a better way to describe a 5+ sigma signal, if that’s what the combined CMS/ATLAS data shows).

Update: Curiouser and curiouser. I’m hearing that per-experiment combinations are around 5 sigma or above. Very unclear why the AP report is indicating no completely conclusive discovery announcement. Maybe the CERN administration is playing a game with us, downplaying expectations…

Update: As pointed out in a comment, Matthew Chalmers at Nature has

The ATLAS and CMS experiments are each seeing signals between 4.5 and 5 sigma, just a whisker away from a solid discovery claim.

Update: The Atlantic covers the best blogs you should be reading to follow the Higgs story. They miss Resonaances and a few others. About me, they have:

If the Higgs boson was a dead celebrity, Woit would be your TMZ — first to the scene, first to break it, and have it be right.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 31 Comments

Higgs Update

Posted on June 28, 2012 by woit

The Higgs discovery announcement will be at 9am next Wednesday. This is close enough that I can’t reasonably be accused of “subverting the scientific process” and ruining the LHC Higgs analyses by reporting the results here. Unfortunately, no source has provided me with these results yet, so that won’t happen anyway, at least not right now. However, I have learned the following, which may be of interest:

  • On Monday at 9am Fermilab will try and steal a little bit of the LHC’s thunder by announcing some new evidence for the Higgs from the Tevatron data. This uses the channel of a Higgs produced with a W or Z, the Higgs then decaying to pairs of b-quarks. This is a channel where the Tevatron is sensitive to a Higgs signal, but the LHC isn’t (at the higher LHC energies backgrounds are too large).
  • ATLAS and CMS each collected about 6 inverse femtobarns of data before the technical stop on June 18th, and they are rushing to get as much of it analyzed as possible. They are concentrating on the two most sensitive channels: H->gamma+gamma and H->ZZ->4l and are likely to have over 5 inverse femtobarns of 2012 8 TeV data analyzed in these two channels to present at ICHEP.
  • There may not be any 2012 Higgs data from other channels presented at ICHEP. ATLAS will have a H->WW->lvlv analysis, but likely not ready for public release.
  • To get the statistical significance necessary to claim a Higgs discovery, the experiments will be producing a combination of their best analysis of the 2011 data in all channels and the 2012 data in the H->gamma+gamma and H->ZZ->4l channels.
  • There will be no CERN combination of ATLAS and CMS results publicly released. This is not because such a thing is hard to do (and I believe it is actually being done, just not released), but because of political reasons. I don’t much understand these, but this blog entry gives some of the kind of reasoning being used.
  • With no CERN combination, attention will focus on Philip Gibbs at viXra log who in the past has produced reliable unofficial combinations of data, and is likely to do so again.
  • With the discovery a done deal, the attention of physicists will focus on the question of whether the signal being seen is compatible with SM predictions, or whether this new particle has unexpected properties. Here the main two numbers to look for are the ATLAS + CMS signal size in each of the two most sensitive channels. To get these, you can do your own combination of the separate ATLAS and CMS numbers, or wait for Philip. The signal size is a product of the Higgs production cross-section and the branching ratio for the channel. I’ve seen estimates of the reliability of the SM prediction of the cross-section varying from 15% to 25% (see more here). The branching ratios are much more accurately known.
  • Probably nothing new about SUSY at ICHEP. New SUSY analyses are being targeted for the SUSY2012 conference in August.

Update: Resonaances has more here, including the news that CMS will report 2012 data about the H->WW->lvlv channel (about the significance of this, see the June 29 posting at viXra log), and possibly others. Whether the 5 sigma significance level will be reached by a single experiment remains unclear…

Update: Finally confirmation from a reliable media outlet… The Daily Mail reports God particle is ‘found’. One evidence for this is that supposedly “Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday”. This may mean Englert, Higgs, Guralnik, Kibble and Hagen, with Anderson getting dissed as usual.

Update: Tommaso Dorigo is providing background to the imminent Tevatron announcement here, and I assume will be discussing the actual results immediately upon release. The papers with the results will be released here this morning.

Update: The interesting bottom line from the Tevatron is that they see an excess in the bb channel that the LHC is not sensitive to, of size 2 +/- .7 times that predicted by the SM for a Higgs of mass 125 GeV. So, a marginally significant signal, of size consistent with the SM. The LHC should soon report the sizes of such signals in 3 other channels. In a couple of days we’ll have excesses in four channels, of sizes enough to claim discovery of a Higgs (or something very much like it, depending on how consistent the signal sizes are with the SM).

Update: The Tevatron paper on the Higgs combination is here. Most important number is the fit for the signal size for H->bb, for a 125 GeV Higgs. It’s 1.97 +.74/-.68 (where the SM prediction is 1).

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 38 Comments

Higgs Discovery Announcement July 4

Posted on June 22, 2012 by woit

I learned via Physics World that CERN will hold a press conference on Wednesday July 4 to give an “Update on the search for the Higgs Boson”. More information has just appeared (including a press release here), showing that there will be a 2 hour seminar on the results starting at 9am Geneva time, followed by a press conference at 11am.

Reports from the experiments indicate that at least one of them, if not both, will reach the 5 sigma level of significance for the Higgs signal, when they combine 2011 and 2012 data and the most sensitive channels. So, this will definitely be the long-awaited Higgs discovery announcement, and party-time for HEP physicists.

One could note that the last major announcement of the discovery of a new elementary particle at CERN was also made on a Wednesday, July 4, back in 1984. That one didn’t work out so well, but things are very different now, with results from two independent experiments and a high standard of evidence.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 31 Comments

The Higgs Discovery

Posted on June 17, 2012 by woit

Just got out of 8 days in the Grand Canyon which was spectacular,

Reliable rumors couldn’t wait, and they indicate that the experiments are seeing much the same thing as last year in this year’s new data: strong hints of a Higgs around 125 GeV. The main channel investigated is the gamma-gamma channel where they are each seeing about a 4 sigma signal.

More later when I reach civilization.

Update: Back in civilization, or at least New York City. The above was the first posting I’ve ever written on an iphone, late at night. Now I have a real keyboard, so I can write a bit more. The “4 sigma signal” refers to the combined 2011 and new 2012 data. To oversimplify the situation, last year both experiments were seeing roughly a 3 sigma excess in gamma-gamma around 125 GeV. This was enough to convince many people that it was highly likely that this was the Higgs. However, that size excess is not completely convincing, it is not unheard of for there to be statistical flukes of such size.

The 2012 data that is being analyzed for ICHEP is of a similar size to the 2011 data. If 2011 was a fluke, you expect to see nothing much around 125 GeV in the 2012 data. If the 2011 signal really was the Higgs you expect the signal to strengthen. What I’m hearing from both experiments is that they are seeing an excess in the new data, strengthening the significance of the signal.

Exactly how much data they’ll have analyzed by ICHEP and exactly what the significance of the signal in the gamma-gamma channel will be (as well as what other channels will show) is still to be seen. CERN will soon have to decide how to spin this: will they announce discovery of the Higgs, or will they wait for some overwhelmingly convincing standard to be met, such as 5 sigma in at least one channel of one experiment? The bottom line though is now clear: there’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look. Attention will soon move to seeing if this signal is exactly what the SM predicts (e.g. will the excesses in different channels agree with SM predictions?).

More details about this from Philip Gibbs (who is speculating about what will be announced), and from Tommaso Dorigo (who is keeping quiet about what he knows, but providing context for what the ICHEP announcements will mean).

Update: Matt Strassler has more about this here. He provides about 20 links to his own blog, no link to the source of his information (this posting). It appears that this is because I’m a “non-particle-physicist blogger” engaged in a conspiratorial plot with some of the 6000+ people who know this latest news to “subvert the scientific process” by sharing it with others.

Update: There are stories about this at Wired, New Scientist and the New York Times. The New York Times article emphasizes that the Higgs results are now “Shrouded in Secrecy”, with the spokeswoman for ATLAS pleading “Please do not believe the blogs”.

According to Matt Strassler “the experimentalists can’t possibly have their data in presentable form yet, so the rumors can’t be correct in every detail”. To clarify any confusion

“Exactly how much data they’ll have analyzed by ICHEP and exactly what the significance of the signal in the gamma-gamma channel will be (as well as what other channels will show) is still to be seen”

means that the above rumors were based on just part of the data (significantly less than half in the ATLAS case, somewhat more than half in the CMS case).

Update: I think I’m too old to ever really understand Twitter, but it seems that #HiggsRumors is a “Trending Topic”, whatever that means. More explanation available from Jennifer Ouellette, and sensible commentary from Chad Orzel.

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Favorite Old Posts | 88 Comments

Too Much Ain’t Enough Langlands

Posted on June 7, 2012 by woit

I should be packing for my trip, but couldn’t resist one last blog posting, since I’ve recently a run across a lot of interesting Langlands-related material, including:

  • A Symposium this fall at the Fields Institute, in honor of Ngo’s Fields Medal winning work, on Fundamentals of the Langlands Program. They have a symposium blog, and including a video with Jim Arthur who gives a little bit of historical background to the Langlands Program.
  • This past semester the Fields Institute has had a program on Galois Represesentations, with an instructional workshop, lecture series by Michael Harris and Christophe Breuil, and lots more. Some notes are on the instructional workshop page, and lots of audio of the talks are available here (so you can see what trying to learn math will be like when you go blind).
  • To hear from the man himself, there’s something old here (notes here), something from last year here.
  • In recent years Matt Emerton has written some wonderful expository pieces, often on Langlands-related topics, as the answers to questions on MathOverflow. He has collected links to them here.
Posted in Langlands | Comments Off on Too Much Ain’t Enough Langlands

High Drama

Posted on June 7, 2012 by woit

It’s exactly a month until new LHC Higgs results are to be unveiled at ICHEP. The machine has been running well, and right about now should be the cut-off time after which new data will arrive too late for analysis before ICHEP. So the integrated luminosity available for each experiment to analyze will be about 4.5 inverse femtobarns. See Tommaso Dorigo for an explanation of what this means. Very roughly, if the Higgs is there with a mass around 125 GeV, each experiment should see tentative signal similar to last year’s, with the combination of data from both years and both experiments likely reaching the 5 sigma standard necessary to declare discovery. If no signal similar to last year’s is seen, this will seriously re-open the possibility of no Higgs (or a very different Higgs than the SM one). Either way, should be very exciting.

For the other story people are following, the death of SUSY, see Nima Arkani-Hamed’s recent talk. He lists as “High Drama for 2012” not just the Higgs, but also SUSY results on stops, gluinos and multileptons. Here I think most people have given up hope that evidence for SUSY will be found, so the high drama is the human one of how SUSY advocates will react as remaining possible SUSY hiding places are mopped up. The conference was in honor of Savas Dimopoulos, who has been working on SUSY models for more than 30 years, so Arkani-Hamed’s talk didn’t even acknowledge the possibility of no SUSY. He described the 2 alternatives available to physics as “natural SUSY”, which is just about ruled out, and various versions of “split supersymmetry”, where superpartner masses can be pushed arbitrarily high, out of the reach of the LHC or any conceivable experiment. He didn’t mention the version one commenter here recently brought up, “super-split supersymmetry”, which was an April Fool’s joke, but may be the direction the field is headed.

Tommaso notes that the new data has been blinded by the experiments, meaning that even those working with it don’t know anything about what the final result will be until the last stage of the analysis. Whenever that might be, I’m hoping reliable rumors will soon ensue.

I’m heading out on vacation tomorrow, to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, out of reach of the internet until about June 18th. During this time I’ll have to shut off comments here. So, hold your reliable rumors until I get back….

Update: Seems that some of these reliable rumors just won’t wait. Whatever Tommaso says about CMS blinding its data, either that’s not the case at ATLAS, or some of it is now unblinded. I hear that the first chunk of gamma-gamma data is showing some signs (2 sigma) of a signal at about the same place as last year’s data. Analysis of more data is proceeding, and very soon people at ATLAS will know whether there’s a signal there. High drama….

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 4 Comments

25 Years of Topological Quantum Field Theory

Posted on May 31, 2012 by woit

It occurred to me today that right about now is the time someone should have chosen as the date for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the idea of “Topological Quantum Field Theory”, as well as some much less well-known ideas about the relationship of QFT and mathematics that still await full investigation.

Just about 25 years ago, from May 12-16 1987, there was a remarkable conference that I attended at Duke, to celebrate the “Mathematical Heritage of Hermann Weyl”, two years after the centenary of his birth. The proceedings were published a year or so later. At this conference, Michael Atiyah gave an amazing talk with the title New invariants for manifolds of dimensions 3 and 4. In it he unveiled a vista of new ideas about topology that would dominate the subject for years to come. For symplectic manifolds he described Andreas Floer’s unpublished new ideas about what came to be known as “Floer Homology” and how these gave new invariants of such manifolds and their Lagrangian submanifolds, invariants related to very recent work of Gromov (now known as “Gromov-Witten invariants”). Replacing 1d (Lagrangian paths) and 2d (pseudo-holomorphic curves) objects in a symplectic manifold by 3d (flat connections) and 4d (instantons) objects in a space of connections on a 4d manifold gave yet another whole new world of mathematics. This is the subject of Floer Homology and Donaldson invariants for 4d manifolds, possibly with boundary, (and was based on work of Floer and Donaldson that was still unpublished). Finally, the Euler characteristic of Floer Homology was identified with a new invariant due to Casson (also unpublished, it seemed like nothing Atiyah was talking about was yet written up), which was a 3d invariant that fit beautifully into the whole picture.

There’s a copy of Atiyah’s write-up of the talk online here (perhaps the AMS will ignore any intellectual property issues here for the greater good). I see that, increasingly like everything else in the world, electronic access to the book is controlled by Google, see Google Play, which I didn’t even know existed.

An inspiration for Floer had been Witten’s ground-breaking paper “Supersymmetry and Morse Theory”, which dealt with the relationship between Morse theory and some supersymmetric quantum mechanics models. Atiyah explained some of these ideas in the talk and towards the end conjectured that quantum field theories were part of the story. His conjectural QFTs would have Floer homology as their ground states and would turn out to be the basic examples of TQFTs. After repeated prodding from Atiyah, Witten a year later produced such theories as twisted N=2 supersymmetric QFTs: a sigma model for the symplectic manifold case, and a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory for the 4d case. In his final remarks, Atiyah raised the issue of knot invariants and the Jones polynomial, suggesting that this too would have a QFT interpretation, something that came to fruition a couple years later with Witten’s Chern-Simons theory that won him a Fields medal. Witten was at the talk, and I recall him coming down to the podium to ask Atiyah some questions about the Jones polynomial immediately after the lecture.

The Duke conference was also significant to me for personal reasons. At the time I was a postdoc at the ITP in Stony Brook, looking for a job and trying to figure out my future. It was becoming clear that physics departments didn’t want to hear from any young theorists interested in mathematics who weren’t doing string theory. I had been spending a lot of time at Stony Brook learning more mathematics and talking to some of the geometers there, who were housed on the floor below the ITP. My trip to the conference at Duke was motivated partly by a desire to visit my grandparents who were in North Carolina for the summer, as well as a plan to investigate prospects for a career change into mathematics. The Atiyah talk bowled me over, convincing me that the intersection of mathematics and QFT had an exciting future. Getting to know a bit more about the mathematical community showed me it could be a great place to work, in many ways much more welcoming and open to new ideas than the physics community. I soon moved up to Cambridge for a year, where the Harvard Physics department let me use a desk, and found a part-time job teaching calculus at Tufts.

What’s remarkable to me now looking at the conference volume is how much exciting material was being discussed, in addition to the fantastic Atiyah talk. Raoul Bott gave a wonderful talk on Borel-Weil-Bott (and its relation to quantization), David Vogan on representation theory in general (and its relation to quantization). Roger Howe has a contribution also about deep connections between quantum mechanics and what he calls the “oscillator representation”. Jim Lepowsky was talking about Kac-Moody Lie algebras, vertex operators and the Monster group, Is Singer about quantizing gauge theory and string theories, and there were a host of other wonderful talks on topology and geometry.

One topic that I didn’t really appreciate at all at the time was that of Langlands theory. Langlands himself was there, talking about Shimura varieties, and James Arthur talked about the Trace formula and its applications to Langlands theory. I think I may have missed Witten’s talk, since I don’t remember it, but his contribution to the conference proceedings is about how to abstractly think about the theory of 2-d free fermions, in a form that makes sense on an arbitrary curve. A few weeks later (June 23), his amazing paper Quantum Field Theory, Grassmanians and Algebraic Curves was submitted to Communications in Mathematical Physics. If I had to point to a paper that truly looks like 21st century work that fell by accident into the 20th century, this would be it. It gives some strikingly different ways of thinking about QFT in 2d, including tantalizing connections to the structures (“automorphic representations”) that show up in Langlands theory, and has provided inspiration to many people over the years, including the geometric Langlands program. Atiyah’s lecture pointed to new ideas relating QFT to cutting edge geometry and topology, ideas that quickly led to lots of progress, while Witten’s ideas related QFT to representation theory and Langlands theory, in ways that we still have yet to fathom.

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Friedrich Hirzebruch 1927-2012

Posted on May 29, 2012 by woit

The German mathematician Friedrich (Fritz) Hirzebruch passed away a couple days ago, at the age of 84. Hirzebruch was perhaps the most important mathematician in the Germany of the postwar period, responsible for the founding of the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, as well as the yearly Bonn Arbeitstagung conference. The Mathematics Genealogy Project lists him as having 52 Ph.D. students and 368 descendants. There’s a wonderful interview and article about him at the Simons Foundation web-site.

Hirzebruch’s first great mathematical achievement was the proof in 1954 of the generalization of the classical Riemann-Roch theorem to higher dimensional complex manifolds, now known as the Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. This used the new techniques of sheaf cohomology and was one of the centerpieces of the explosion of new results in geometry and topology during the 1950s. Further generalization of this led to the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem, and the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. Hirzebruch’s monograph on the subject Topological Methods in Algebraic Geometry was the essential textbook in this area for many years.

The last time I heard Hirzebruch talk was at the celebration of Atiyah’s 80th birthday in Edinburgh, where Hirzebruch gave a talk about his interactions with Atiyah. He displayed some of their correspondence from this period, which makes fascinating reading and is now available here.

With the loss of Raoul Bott a few years ago, and now Fritz Hirzebruch, the math and physics communities are deprived of two of the great figures who built parts of modern mathematics that appear crucially in the structure of the Standard Model. Much of this connection between math and physics remains a mystery, and it’s too bad they won’t be around to help make progress unraveling it.

Update: The New York Times has a very good obituary of Hirzebruch here.

Posted in Obituaries | 10 Comments

Welcome to the Multiverse

Posted on May 21, 2012 by woit

Multiverse Mania makes the big time this week, with a cover story Welcome to the Multiverse by Brian Greene in Newsweek. While the title indicates that the Multiverse is here and part of our scientific world-view, the subtitle is a bit cagier: “The latest developments in cosmology point toward the possibility that our universe is merely one of billions.”

The article is pretty uniformly a promotional piece for multiverse mania, although buried fairly deep in the piece is something a bit more skeptical:

because the proposal is unquestionably tentative, we must approach it with healthy skepticism and invoke its explanatory framework judiciously.

Imagine that when the apple fell on Newton’s head, he wasn’t inspired to develop the law of gravity, but instead reasoned that some apples fall down, others fall up, and we observe the downward variety simply because the upward ones have long since departed for outer space. The example is facetious but the point serious: used indiscriminately, the multiverse can be a cop-out that diverts scientists from seeking deeper explanations. On the other hand, failure to consider the multiverse can place scientists on a Keplerian treadmill in which they furiously chase answers to unanswerable questions.

Which is all just to say that the multiverse falls squarely in the domain of high-risk science. There are numerous developments that could weaken the motivation for considering it, from scientists finally calculating the correct dark-energy value, or confirming a version of inflationary cosmology that only yields a single universe, or discovering that string theory no longer supports a cornucopia of possible universes. And so on.

I don’t see how we’re anywhere near finding such a version of inflation or getting rid of the string theory landscape, so the only hope of getting any evidence against the multiverse seems to be to calculate the cosmological constant. The multiverse thus looks to be pretty much impregnable and immune to any conceivable scientific challenge. A few years ago, pieces like this would hold out hope that the LHC would discover something encouraging for the multiverse, but now the LHC isn’t even mentioned. The only possible positive evidence suggested is seeing remnants of bubble collisions in the CMB, but the very likely eventuality of not seeing such a thing doesn’t count as evidence against the multiverse idea.

So, I fear Brian is right: Welcome to the Multiverse, physics is going to be stuck with it for a very long time…

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 94 Comments

Higgs Update

Posted on May 21, 2012 by woit

The announcement of new Higgs results from the LHC is now scheduled for about a month and a half from now, July 7th, 9:30 and 10am Melbourne time, at ICHEP2012. The LHC is performing well, with nearly 2.5 fb-1 of integrated luminosity/experiment. With only 2-3 weeks more of data collection before the cutoff for what can be analyzed in time to be made public July 7, one can expect the July announcements to be based on perhaps 4-5 fb-1 per experiment. Rough estimates show that, combining last year’s 5 fb-1 at 7 TeV and this year’s expected data, if the SM Higgs really is there at 125 GeV, each experiment should see a signal of 4 sigma significance. This is not quite the 5 sigma significance traditionally set for a discovery claim, but very close.

It thus looks possible that a discovery claim will require combining the results from CMS and ATLAS. The LHC Higgs Combination Group has been hard at work for the last couple years, developing methods for combining results from the two experiments. This time, they will be ready to quickly combine all the data from the two experiments, and maybe this will be what gives the 5 sigma needed for CERN to claim discovery. I don’t know what the plan is for when they will be provided with the CMS/ATLAS data, or when they plan to announce a result.

The LHC-HCG is competing with Philip Gibbs, who today released a Higgs Combination Java Applet which allows anyone to produce their own data combinations. If the LHC-HCG can’t produce a combination by 10:30am July 7, CERN should perhaps consider getting Philip’s applet properly set up and having DG Heuer publicly press the right button, allowing CERN to claim the Higgs discovery before Philip does.

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 15 Comments