I’ve looked at the talks from a few of the HEP experiment and phenomenology summer conferences. If anyone can point me to anything interesting that I’ve missed, please do so. The lack of new physics beyond the Higgs at the LHC has left the field in a difficult state.<\/p>\n
One conference going on this past week and next is the IAS PiTP summer program aimed at advanced grad students and postdocs. This year the topic is HEP phenomenology, and talks are available here<\/a>. If you want to understand the conventional wisdom on the state of the subject, you can watch Nima Arkani-Hamed’s three and a half hour lecture (here<\/a> and here<\/a>) which he starts off by describing as on the topic “What the Hell is Going On?”.<\/p>\n A lot of the first part is historical, starting off with the Georgi-Glashow GUT and the arguments for SU(5) or SO(10) GUT unification first put forward 43 years ago. He then walks the audience through the sequence of steps theorists have taken to solve the problems of such models, after an hour ending up at the landscape, spending a half an hour promoting the anthropic solution to the CC and other problems. The second part of the talk is largely devoted to making the case for his favored split SUSY models, with anthropics and the landscape taking care of their naturalness problems. By the end of the three and a half hours, Arkani-Hamed admits that this scenario is not that convincing, while arguing that it’s the only thing he can see left that is consistent with the idea that theorists have been following a correct path since 1974:<\/p>\n It’s the only picture of the world that I know where everything that we learned experimentally and theoretically for the last 30 years has some role to play in it. But my confidence in it is not so super high, and I definitely think its worth thinking about completely radically different things.<\/p>\n The disadvantage to the trajectory of going with what works and then changing a little and changing a little is that you might just be in the basin of attraction of the wrong idea from the start and then you’ll just stay there for ever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To me by now the evidence is overwhelming that HEP theory has been in the wrong basin of attraction for quite a while, and the overriding question is what can be done to get out of it. If you’re in the wrong basin of attraction, you need to get out of it by going back to the point where you entered it and looking for another direction. I think Arkani-Hamed is right to identify the 1974 GUT hypothesis as the starting point that led the field into this wrong basin. HEP theory has progressed historically by identifying new more powerful symmetry principles. The move in 1974 was to go beyond the SM symmetries by picking a larger gauge group, then breaking it at a very high energy scale with new scalar fields. The history of the last 43 years is that this idea isn’t a successful one: as this talk shows, it leads to an empty theory that explains nothing. Can one find different new ideas about symmetry that are more promising?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve looked at the talks from a few of the HEP experiment and phenomenology summer conferences. If anyone can point me to anything interesting that I’ve missed, please do so. The lack of new physics beyond the Higgs at the … Continue reading