Higgs Boson News to be announced Dec 13th

Because all of my particles are spherical packing systems, and 12 is the number of same size particles you can get around 1 particle, and a small gap.

 

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All right, I have an uninformed question.

If the Higgs boson gives mass to matter, and Cern is creating Higgs bosons, does this mean they're creating a particle with mass but without matter, since I don't think they're creating it on something: as in, on a subject mass. And secondly, if so, isn't this bad in some way?

 

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Assuming the Higgs exists (as is looking increasingly likely), it doesn't actually "create" mass. What happens is the Higgs interacts with the quarks and when one considers quarks at low energies this interaction gives rise to a term in the equations that looks and behaves exactly as a mass term would (it's technically known as a dynamically generated mass). The Higgs is just an ordinary particle really: it interacts with other particles, and is characterised by it's mass, charge (0) and spin (also 0).

 

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Interesting. So Higgs are just 'out there', in the milieu of the extant world. And is the generation of these transient masses an ongoing thing? Or only under certain circumstances? I mean, do we have to force it or force it only in order to detect it?

Sorry about all the questions.

 

If a Higgs Boson gives particles mass, it must lower their energy.
Is that right?

 

So this is how we're going to run our mass-energy transformers in the future?

 

To make energy from matter.
You would need the Higgs Boson anti-particle for that, surely.

 

I admit I have not as yet read any of the most recent conclusions, but my impression had been the opposite of increasingly likely. It has been my understanding that the probability has been being decreased rather than the opposite. Do you have a specific link, I could check out?

 

"With the data from this year we've ruled out a lot of masses, and now we're just left with this tiny window, in this region that is probably the most interesting," said Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45653534/ns/technology_and_science-science/


So they have not found anything.

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They have found some evidence in exactly the place they expected to find it.
It is promising, but the results so far are by no means conclusive.

 

Re: Questions from GeoffP

It doesn't work that way... What happens is the Higgs has a vacuum energy density which is generally constant throughout the universe, although as I understand it this vacuum energy can be perturbed by the presence of Higgs bosons interacting with other stuff. In turn, it is the interaction of this vacuum energy with various particles that generates their masses.

It's not a means of converting mass to energy or vice-versa, because the total energy never changes in a closed system. Mass is just a measure of a particle's energy in its own personal rest frame, and affects the way it propagates through space and interacts with other particles. The only reason the Higgs is even needed in the first place is because you can't incorporate particle masses into the Standard Model without violating certain other postulates, but adding the Higgs gives you the extra mathematical flexibility to do so.

To sum up the role of mass in Relativity, it's only good for determining certain inertial properties, i.e. how much of a kick a particle needs in order to get moving. When we're talking about conserved quantities, we only care about a system's total energy, whether it's in the form of "rest energy/mass" or in other forms like kinetic energy (i.e. a photon doesn't have a mass, yet it carries energy which can be converted into massive particles upon striking a target).

 

So it doesn't create actual matter, but sort of localized 'mass', then, with effects on gravity and so forth?

Sorry: evolutionary biologist, not physicist. Interesting though.

 

As for the Higgs: Even if they have good preliminary evidence for the Higgs boson(s) in the region(s) where they expect to find it, they won't announce it as a confirmed discovery until it's tested to death, to the point where the presence of the associated detector signals (and the frequency with which such signals appear) would be extremely improbable in theories lacking such particles. They need to collect enough statistics to have what they call "5-sigma confidence levels" or higher.

 

No worries, everyone's got their personal specialties. It was only recently that I got over a long-time confusion I had where I thought the Y-chromosome was actually responsible for coding for testosterone and not just producing the organs which manufacture it en-masse in males.

As for the physics: In Relativity it's not the mass which determines gravity, it's the total energy density (even pressure and tension inside matter can have an effect). Not only can gravity deflect light, but light can also produce gravity. At classical scales where Newton's gravitational laws still apply, an object's energy is mostly contained in stationary particles and correlates closely with its mass.

So really, in a nutshell the Higgs just determines various particles' inertial properties, and in general it's the near-uniform Higgs vacuum field permeating the entire universe that's responsible, although the presence of Higgs bosons can have small influences on that vacuum field in turn. At this point there's no reason to think of it as having any useful practical applications, it's just something we need to be there in order for the math to work out.

 

So it's everywhere at once, at the same level.
Does it only appear as a particle in places like CERN?

What's a vacuum field?

 

The idea is that for every type of fundamental quantum particle, there is a field associated with that particle which permeates the entire universe, that's what we call the "vacuum field". It's like an invisible ocean. Putting energy into these fields results in excitations like ripples on the ocean, and those ripples manifest themselves as interacting particles we can detect and measure. String Theory basically extends on this idea to some extent.

As for actual Higgs particles, in theory they pop in and out of the vacuum all the time even when we're not putting enough energy into actually making them, and we can potentially detect their effects on other particles as they pop in and out (that's one of the things they're trying to do with the experiment I'm working at). To make a Higgs boson which has enough energy to be permanently ripped from the vacuum you need high-energy collisions like what you get at the LHC, or cosmic rays striking our atmosphere, or nuclear reactions inside stars. Except even when you have enough energy to permanently rip a Higgs out of the vacuum, it'll still tend to decay and swap that energy back into the vacuum in exchange for other particles, i.e. it decays into more ordinary matter very quickly and these decays are how we'd be detecting it directly.

 

Actually, they eliminated it in the energy regimes they first examined, which is where they expected to find it. Wasn't there.

Now they're examining the last energy regime available to them, [the higher energy regimes aren't accessible without an 'upgrade' (fixing what will likely break if run at higher energy, as they discovered from the 'accident')] which is at much lower energy, and not where it was initially expected to be detected.

At only about 2+ sigma, it could very easily be a statistical blip, not a signal of the existence of a 'Higgs Boson'. To me, this does not look that 'promising', considering that they had such a blip in the other regime they examined, but it went away after more collisions.

So, it appears they now plan to bang protons through next year to obtain better statistics, and the 'blip' will either become more significant, or less, statistically.

Either way, it's a 'great success' according to Heuer, et al.

Nice job security. If the blip goes away, they'll want to hunt in the higher energy regime not yet accessible. If the blip increases in sigma, they'll crow what a great success.

What I find of greater interest is the 'superluminal neutrino' search, which would be far more 'earthshaking' if true.

 

Don't worry if it all seems too complicated to understand. It usually takes 5-10 years of solid university education to get a good grasp on this kind of stuff.

 

And that includes the common stuff like Protons and Electrons, right?
It doesn't sound particularly complicated, but I haven't heard of it before.
It would explain why space can expand faster than particles can move.

I do like Physics,
but when I was at school they took all interest out of it.
I believed it to be a deadly dull subject.

 

Not protons per se, but their quark constituents yes.

It doesn't have any known relation to the rate at which space expands, that's more of a General Relativity-type question. There are, however, arguments that vacuum field energy might contribute to accelerating this expansion.

The background learning part is boring, the application part is exciting. Same with any other profession, even welding. I guess the boring aspects of the learning curve are what deter so many laymen from properly learning modern theories before they jump in here with their own ideas and start laying on the woo woo (e.g. Reiku/Mister).