Whatever Happened To The LHC-Will-Destroy-The-World Nutcases?

Remember way back when the LHC was about to start up and a couple of nutcases decided to file a lawsuit in the US to stop it? If you missed the fun, read a couple of my earlier posts here and here, and the dismissal of the lawsuit here.

So now that the LHC has run for many years, had gone through an upgrade, and will probably continue to do so for the next few years, what do these wackos have to say for themselves? I know that going back and asking them will probably be fruitless because we are giving them more airtime than they deserve, but I'm always curious to see how someone like this react to the clear demonstration of how wrong he is.

But then again, if something like the Jan 6th insurrection can be called a "legitimate political discourse" despite the most obvious evidence, then there's no convincing some people of how wrong they are.

Zz.

Possible Discovery Of A New Type of Tetraquark, And Possibly Misleading Reporting Article

We have had reports of the discovery of possible tetraquarks and pentaquarks before (i.e. particles with 4 quarks and particles with 5 quarks, respectively). There is an extensive overview of the experiment and theory in this article. So the announcement out of LHCb is not that new. What is new is that this could possibly be a new type of tetraquark made up of 4 heavy quarks.

“Particles made up of four quarks are already exotic, and the one we have just discovered is the first to be made up of four heavy quarks of the same type, specifically two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks,” says the outgoing spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Giovanni Passaleva. “Up until now, LHCb and other experiments had only observed tetraquarks with two heavy quarks at most and none with more than two quarks of the same type.”

You may read the preprint here.

That should clear up very much of what the brouhaha is. I probably would have glanced over this had it not be the fact that I stumbled onto another news reports of this discovery, but with a different tone that could be misleading.

First of all, let's look at how CERN produced its news release. The first paragraph read like this:

The LHCb collaboration has observed a type of four-quark particle never seen before. The discovery, presented at a recent seminar at CERN and described in a paper posted today on the arXiv preprint server, is likely to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.

Notice that it says "... a type of four-quark particle ...". This means that there are already other four-quark particles, and that this discover is for a new type that has not been observed before.

Now, compare that to the reporting done by two (count 'em) particle physicists on The Conversation (a place that I go to regularly) on the same discovery. Here is what they wrote:

The LHCb collaboration at CERN has announced the discovery of a new exotic particle: a so-called “tetraquark”. The paper by more than 800 authors is yet to be evaluated by other scientists in a process called “peer review”, but has been presented at a seminar. It also meets the usual statistical threshold for claiming the discovery of a new particle.

If you don't know any better, by reading the first sentence alone, you'd think that this is the first ever discovery of a tetraquark, which would be false.

Certainly, if you read the article further, you'd come across the passage that clarifies what this discovery is:

All tetraquarks and pentaquarks that have been discovered so far contain two charm quarks, which are relatively heavy, and two or three light quarks – up, down or strange. This particular configuration is indeed the easiest to discover in experiments.

But the latest tetraquark discovered by LHCb, which has been dubbed X(6900), is composed of four charm quarks. Produced in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the new tetraquark was observed via its decay into pairs of well-known particles called J/psi mesons, each made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. This makes it particularly interesting as it is not only composed entirely of heavy quarks, but also four quarks of the same kind – making it a unique specimen to test our understanding on how quarks bind together.

So this is not the first discovery of a tetraquark, but rather a discovery of a type of tetraquark, which is what the CERN article implied.

I know I'm being picky, but I've always said that communication between scientists and the general public is extremely tedious. Often times, what you wrote is not what they understood! And once something or some impression has stuck into their heads, it is very difficult to change that. Having a misleading idea immediately imprinted at the very beginning of an article is a horrible thing to do, even if the rest of the article is accurate. At worse, the reader holds on to the original misleading idea, and at best, the reader becomes confused with conflicting understanding. In the world where a lot of people have attention deficit and all they care about are quick bites of news, the message conveyed in the very first paragraph, or even the very first line, is all that they read and get.

Zz.

CP Violation in D Meson Decay

LHCb is reporting the first evidence of CP violation in the decay of D meson.

The D⁰ meson is made of a charm quark and an up antiquark. So far, CP violation has only been observed in particles containing a strange or a bottom quark. These observations have confirmed the pattern of CP violation described in the Standard Model by the so-called Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) mixing matrix, which characterises how quarks of different types transform into each other via weak interactions. The deep origin of the CKM matrix, and the quest for additional sources and manifestations of CP violation, are among the big open questions of particle physics. The discovery of CP violation in the D⁰ meson is the first evidence of this asymmetry for the charm quark, adding new elements to the exploration of these questions.

If confirmed, this will be another meson that has exhibited such CP violation, and adds to the argument that such symmetry violation could be the source of our matter-antimatter asymmetry in this universe.

CP violation is an essential feature of our universe, necessary to induce the processes that, following the Big Bang, established the abundance of matter over antimatter that we observe in the present-day universe. The size of CP violation observed so far in Standard Model interactions, however, is too small to account for the present-day matter–antimatter imbalance, suggesting the existence of additional as-yet-unknown sources of CP violation.

Zz.

Tommaso Dorigo's "False Claims In Particle Physics"

Hey, you should read this blog post by Tommaso Dorigo. It touches upon many of the myths regarding particle physics, especially the hype surrounding the name "god particle", as if that means something.

I've touched upon some of the issues he brought up. I think many of us who are active online and deal with the media and the public tend to see and observe the same thing, the same mistakes, and misinformation that are being put in print. One can only hope that by repeatedly pointing out such myths and why they are wrong, the message will slowly seep into the public consciousness.

I just wish it is seeping through faster.

Zz.

Table-Top Elementary Particle Experiment

I love reading articles like this one, where it shows that one can do quite useful research in elementary particles using experimental setup that is significantly smaller (and cheaper) than large particle colliders.

Now, he’s suddenly moving from the fringes of physics to the limelight. Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is about to open a first-of-its-kind research institute dedicated to just his sort of small-scale particle physics, and Gabrielse will be its founding director.

The move signals a shift in the search for new physics. Researchers have dreamed of finding subatomic particles that could help them to solve some of the thorniest remaining problems in physics. But six years’ worth of LHC data have failed to produce a definitive detection of anything unexpected.

More physicists are moving in Gabrielse’s direction, with modest set-ups that can fit in standard university laboratories. Instead of brute-force methods such as smashing particles, these low-energy experimentalists use precision techniques to look for extraordinarily subtle deviations in some of nature’s most fundamental parameters. The slightest discrepancy could point the way to the field’s future. 

Again, I salute very much this type of endeavor, but I dislike the tone of the title of the article, and I'll tell you why.

In science, and especially physics, there is seldom something that has been verified, found, or discovered using just ONE experimental technique or detection method. For example, in the discovery of the Top quark, both CDF and D0 detectors at Fermilab had to agree. In the discovery of the Higgs, both ATLAS and CMS had to agree. In trying to show that something is a superconductor, you not only measure the resistivity, but also magnetic susceptibility.

In other words, you require many different types of verification, and the more the better or the more convincing it becomes.

While these table-top experiments are very ingenious, they will NOT replace the big colliders. No one in their right mind will tell CERN to "step aside", other than the author of this article. There are discoveries or parameters of elementary particles that these table-top experiments can study more efficiently than the LHC, but there are also plenty of the parameter phase space that the LHC can probe that can't be easily reached by these table-top experiments. They all are complimenting each other!

People who don't know any better, or don't know the intricacies of how experiments are done or how knowledge is gathered, will get the impression that because of these table-top experiments, facilities like the LHC will no longer be needed. I hate to think that this is the "take-home" message that many people will get.

Zz.

The Higgs - Five Years In

In case you've been asleep the past 5 years or so and what to catch up on our lovable Higgs, here is a quick, condensed version of the saga so far.

Where were you on 4 July 2012, the day the Higgs boson discovery was announced? Many people will be able to answer without referring to their diary. Perhaps you were among the few who had managed to secure a seat in CERN’s main auditorium, or who joined colleagues in universities and laboratories around the world to watch the webcast.

This story promises to have lots of sequels, just like the movies released so far this year.

Zz.

Planning For A Future Circular Collider

The future of the next circular collider to follow up the LHC is currently on the table. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is envisioned to be 80-100 km in circumference (as compared to 27 km for the LHC) and reaching energy as high as 100 TeV (as compared to 13 TeV for the LHC).

Now you may think that this is way too early to think about such a thing, especially when the LHC is still in its prime and probably will be operating for a very long time. But planning and building one of these things take decades. As stated at the end of the article, the LHC itself took about 30 years from its planning stage all the way to its first operation. So you can't simply decide to get one of these built and hope to have it ready in a couple of years. It is the ultimate in long-term planning. No instant gratification here.

In the meantime, the next big project in high-energy physics collider is a linear collider, some form of the International Linear Collider that has been tossed around for many years. China and Japan look to still be the most likely place where this will be built. I do not foresee the US being a leading candidate during the next 4 years for any of these big, international facilities requiring multinational effort.

Zz.

Who Will Host The Next LHC?

Nature has an interesting article on the issues surrounding the politics, funding, and physics in building the next giant particle collider beyond the LHC.

The Japanese are the front-runner to host the ILC, but the Chinese have their own plans on a circular electron-positron collider that can be upgraded to a future proton-proton collider.

And of course, all of these will require quite a bit of chump change to fund, and will be an international collaboration.

The climate in the US continues to be very sour in building anything like this.

Zz.

The 750-GeV Blip At LHC - It Came And Went

A lot of HEP were in a tizzy since last year over the unexpected peak in the data at 750 GeV. And now, early reports from the current meeting going on in Chicago are indicating that this might be just a statistical anomaly.

Sadly, it seems that the 750 GeV particle wasn’t meant to be. Physicists at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Chicago were due to reveal the latest data on the excess of photon pairs at 750 GeV later today, but a paper accidentally posted online last night by the CMS collaboration states that their new round of data found no extra photons. This suggests the earlier hints were just a statistical fluke.

“As data comes in, excesses tend to come and go,” says CMS researcher Nadja Strobbe at Fermilab, near Batavia, Illinois. Researchers from ATLAS are due to present their results later today, but rumours suggest they will announce that the 750 GeV bump is gone.

But the fun part is all the theory papers that came gushing out as soon as the possibility of this being real.

A week after the announcement, theorists had written over 100 possible explanations; today, there are over 500. Nearly all of these papers posit the existence of a particle with a mass of 750 GeV or higher whose decay created the extra photons. Because this particle would have been outside the standard model of particle physics, it could have forced a reconsideration of how particles and forces interact.

I've always been curious to ask many of the people who did similar things on what they have to say for themselves. They had just created an explanation for the existence of the unicorn.

This is not new. When the OPERA collaboration indicated a faster-than-light neutrino detection a few years ago, numerous theory papers came out for that as well, proposing a myriad of particles and new physics. This is all before this result was confirmed. And of course, we all know what happened with that one as well.

I guess that people would rather be FIRST to be correct rather than be cautious and not appear foolish. After all, how many of us would remember that such-and-such wrote a paper to explain something that never existed in the first place?

Zz.

New Physics Beyond The Higgs?

Marcelo Gleiser has written a nice article on the curious 750 GeV bump coming from the LHC as announced last year. It is a very good article for the general public, especially on his condensed version of the analysis provided by PRL on the possible origin of this bump.

Still, there is an important point that I want to highlight that is not necessarily about this particular experiment, but rather about physicists and how physics is done. It is in this paragraph:

The exciting part of this is that the bump would be new, surprising physics, beyond expectations. There's nothing more interesting for a scientist than to have the unexpected show up, as if nature is trying to nudge us to look in a different direction.

If you have followed this blog for a considerable period of time, you would have read something similar in my many postings. This is especially true when I tried to debunk the erroneous claim of many crackpots who keep stressing that scientists are merely people who simply work within the box, and can't think outside of the box, or refuse to look for something new. This is of course, utterly dumb and false, because scientists, by definition, study things that are not known, not fully understood, etc. Otherwise, there will be no progression of knowledge the way we have seen it.

I'm going to keep harping this, because I continue to see nonsense like this being perpetuated in many different places.

Zz.

LHC Knocked Out By A Weasel?

You can't make these things up!

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland, lost power Friday. Engineers who were investigating the outage made a grisly discovery -- the charred remains of a weasel, CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told CNN.
If you are a weasel kind, be forewarned! Don't mess around at CERN!

Zz.

Socio-Economic Impact of the LHC

This is an interesting analysis of the impact of the LHC, especially in terms of economics.

I think many politicians and the general public do not realize that even for something that is built to study something that appears to be esoteric and no direct and immediate application, there can be immediate benefits socially and economically.

That is why I continue to be surprised and appalled that the US continue to not "care" about their loss in having any kind of high-energy physics particle collider on their soil anymore. This is especially puzzling in light of the fact that other parts of the world are seriously pursuing having such experiments within their borders, even if it is under an international collaboration. Certainly China is pursuing having such facilities, and Japan just announced the start of an electron-positron collider. As far as I'm aware of, Japan is the leading contender for hosting the International Linear Collider (ILC), something that Fermilab has also been pursuing.

But with the devastating budget issues in the US, this is looking to be very bleak. People seem to only see the money being spent on such facilities, without realizing the significant impact not only on the intellectual aspect of it, but the economic impacts, both short-term and long-term. An analysis done in this preprint may not make it to the people who hold the power, but it is certainly there to be seen.

Zz.

Higgs Mass Refined

The combined data from ATLAS and CMS from LHC Run 1 has produced a Higgs mass with greater accuracy.

ATLAS reported the mass of this new boson to be in the mass region of 126 billion electronvolts, and CMS found it to be in the region of 125. In May 2015, the two experiments combined their measurements, refining the Higgs mass closer to 125.09 GeV.

But what is important is the report on the measurement of the coupling strength in the Higgs interactions.

This particular analysis focused on the interaction of the Higgs boson with other particles, known as coupling strength. The combined measurements are more precise than each experiment could accomplish alone, and results establish that the Higgs mechanism grants mass to both the matter and force-carrying particles as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
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In the Standard Model, how strongly the Higgs boson couples to another particle determines that particle’s mass and the rate at which a Higgs boson decays into other particles.
For instance, the Higgs boson couples strongly with the bottom quark and very weakly with the electron; therefore, the bottom quark has a much greater mass than the electron and the Higgs will commonly decay into a bottom quark and its antiquark.

This is why there is still a lot more to be measured and refined in Run 2.

Zz.

The Apparent Pentaquark Discovery - More Explanation

Recall the report on the apparent observation of a pentaquark made by LHCb a few weeks back. Fermilab's Don Lincoln had a video that explains a bit of what a quark is, what a pentaquark is, and how physics will proceed in verifying this.



Zz.

Record Number of Authors In Physics Paper - Follow Up

Remember just barely a couple of months ago, I mentioned about the brouhaha regarding the record number of authors in a combined CMS/ATLAS paper out of the LHC/CERN? In a Physics Today article, there's a bit more on this, especially on the possibly "light-hearted" nature of the Wall Street Journal article that first mentioned this.

As I've mentioned in the earlier entry, I don't quite know why this is such a freaking big deal. The experiments are getting to be more and more difficult, it requires a more complex instrument, and thus, require a lot more people. The fact that this paper actually combined the results from two HUGE collaboration should, as expected, results in a lengthy authors list. What is the big issue here?

Unfortunately, it gives the wrong impression to the rest of the public. The fact that areas such as condensed matter physics, which produces way, WAY more papers than high energy physics and usually tend to have a significantly small number of authors, somehow has been ignored (Phys. Rev. B, for example, which publishes papers in condensed matter/material  science, is produced TWICE a month, and each edition contains TWO volumes!). And yet, the exception here has been used as a rule for the entire field of physics! Where is the logic in that?

And for the record, I had published a paper in PRL, on an experimental work, no less, and the paper only had THREE authors. Count em'!

Zz.

Report From 13 TeV

So far so good!

This report briefly describes the achievement of getting to 13 TeV collision energy at the LHC.

At 10.40 a.m. on 3 June, the LHC operators declared "stable beams" for the first time at a beam energy of 6.5 TeV. It was the signal for the LHC experiments to start taking physics data for Run 2, this time at a collision energy of 13 TeV – nearly double the 7 TeV with which Run 1 began in March 2010.

So far, they haven't been swallowed by a catastrophic black hole that is supposed to destroy our world. Darn it! What's next? Sighting of supersymmetry particles? You must be joking!

Zz.

Pentaquark Discovery - Here We Go Again!

I read with a combination excitement and skepticism of the report that LHCb may have seen not one, but two pentaquarks. The skepticism should be justified because previous claims of the discovery of such quarks have turned out to be false. Still, this one comes with a 9sigma statistics.

The LHCb team is confident that the particles are indeed pentaquarks that comprise two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark and one anticharm quark. "Benefitting from the large data set provided by the LHC, and the excellent precision of our detector, we have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states," explains LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University in the US. 

As always, and as with any other new and important claim, time will tell as more analysis and experiments are done. The public and the media, especially, need to understand that this is still a work in progress, as with any scientific endeavor.

Zz.

The Philosophy of the LHC

This is actually a nice article, and unlike other "confrontational" issues with regards to Physics and Philosophy, it addresses areas in which Philosophy can actually be of use in Physics, but not in the usual sense that have been tossed around.

There have been many tedious and futile discussions about the value of philosophy for modern science. I find it much more interesting and fruitful to ask if and in what way modern science can advance philosophy. The complexity, the new challenges and the new methods that arise in modern science in general - and at the LHC in particular - raise a number of questions that concern core issues of philosophy of science: what are the methods of acquiring knowledge, what is the role of models, and how does the intricate relationship between theory, computer simulations and experimental data work? The LHC has been built for fundamental physics, but it will also challenge and advance the philosophy, sociology and history of science!

We don't hear much about this aspect, mainly because it isn't "sexy". But this is a unique and useful convergence, and with physics opening up a myriad of discoveries that have changed our world view, there's nothing wrong with philosophy being guided by such discoveries.

Zz.

LHC at 13 TeV - Where Are The Crackpots Now?

I taunted the doomsday crackpots when the LHC hit 8 TeV a while back, and I'm going to taunt then again now. So where are these jokers hiding and what are their excuses for our world still had not been swallowed up by a gigantic blackhole created by the high-energy collisions?

Now granted that the last thing I want to do is hear any more nonsensical ramblings from these folks. They've take up too much oxygen already in their lifetimes. But still, I sometime wish I can come across one of them, and really, REALLY, ask them if they think that they have a huge egg on their faces. There is just not enough follow-up on things like this, and I often wonder if these people actually learned something from their silliness, or if they are still delusional and stubborn about it.

At some level, the same can be said about all those preprints and theories that came out when OPERA reported faster-than-light neutrinos. I sometime wish I could talk to these people, who I don't consider to be crackpots, but who should know better than to jump the gun. I always wanted to know why they publish their theories THAT quickly to jump on the bandwagon. Is it the idea of wanting to be the first? Is it the concept of throwing out as many darts as one can and hope that one will stick? How do they feel now that they somehow came up with a theory based on a non-existing evidence?

So many questions, and so little time to find out the answers.

Zz.

The Detectors at the LHC

Don Lincoln has a video on the 4 detectors at the LHC.



As you watch this, don't miss the fact that these are "... technological marvels..." in themselves, and that high energy physics had to invent and make their own detectors and detection processes to advance the field. Detector and instrumentation physics have always been an integral part of experimental high energy physics, and one often sees students in this field that are actually working on detector physics.

As a consequence, high energy physics drives innovations and new applications that eventually leaks into the rest of the world. This is a point that is often missed by those outside of the field.

Zz.