HIGGS! FINALLY!

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Well, it finally popped up; the elusive Higgs Boson. Just reported from CERN by two independent research teams comprised of a total of 3000 scientists and engineers! See: Science Daily and Science Magazine Online for details. The Official CERN Press Release is also cool reading.

For those of you not too terribly familiar with the importance of this find, or for my AP Kids who fell asleep in May, allow me some Fizzix Pontification. There is a model (sorta full set of theories and such that works) that explains the way matter is built, how it behaves, what it's made of, and all that particle physics stuff. It's called the Standard Model of Matter (or SM of Particle Physics if you want to sound more imposing at a party...). It's basically a large set of relationships between all those subatomic particles that make up everything we see, touch, feel, or otherwise can detect and we call matter. You can think of it as a recipe for matter and the Universe. A great place to start learning about this stuff is Berkeley Labs The Particle Adventure. A laymen's outline? Sure.

Courtesy CPEPweb.org (Contemporary Physics Ed Project)
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All regular matter is made of only 12 Fermions (6 quarks and 6 leptons) and 4 Bosons (Force carriers). The Fermions are 3 "pairs" of each quarks and leptons. You may have heard of the quark somewhere along the line if you were paying attention in class. They make up what used to be called the Protons and Neutrons and a "zoo" of other subatomic particle. A proton is simply an AREA of space where 3 quarks, 2 "ups" and one "down" exist. The neutron is made of 3 quarks also, but 2 "downs" and one "up". The quark "pairs" are whimsically called up & down', charm & strange, and top & bottom. Leptons? Some of them are strange named things, but you have heard of the electron. It's one of the 6 leptons. Leptons are the electron, tau, and muon and their associated neutrinos (electron neutrino, tau neutrino, & the muon neutrino). [NOTE: This does not include Dark Matter! We have no frikkin' clue on what that stuff is yet...]

CPEPweb.org
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For all of the details included in the Standard Model to work, there HAD TO BE a reason for mass to exist. Believe it or not, even though we've known about all these particles and how they interact, we've never really had a good explanation of what actually caused a particle, and thereby a group of particles that make up an object, to have mass! Why do I have a mass of 110kg? Why is a quark more massive than an electron even though they are the same "size"? Well? WHY?

Enter English physicist, Peter Higgs. In 1964, he, along with a few others, devised a strange sounding things called "broken symmetry of the electroweak theory". Yeah, just saying that hurts, don't it? In it, he proposed this thing, a field, an invisible force field type thing, that had to permate all of space in order for a particle to actually have mass; otherwise, there was no reason for a particle like an electron to even have mass. Without this Higgs Field, an electron could just fly around at the speed of light and have no mass and be weird like. The Standard Model (which didn't really exist like it does today...) at the time had no explanation of why mass was mass. He further proposed that the Standard Model would be fine if there were a particle that "exuded" this invisible field, called the Higgs Field", and this predicted particle was dubbed the "Higgs Particle".

So, what does all this mean?

By the 80's this Higgs Particle had been mathematically shown to be a boson. Boson, besides being what I've called some of my bosses in the past, is the name given to a group of particles called the "force-carrier" particles. They include photons (EM carrier like light), gluons (hold quarks, therefore nuclei, together), and the Z and W Bosons. "Boson" is named after the Indian mathematical physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, a contemporary of Einstein. Put these two names together and you get the familiar, but very misunderstood, Bose-Einstein Condensate; a topic for a later and much longer post. Bosons obey Bose-Einstein Statistics; meaning they CAN violate the Pauli Explusion Principle and occupy the same place at the same time and even have the exact same properties as each other; the same quantum state. "Regular" particles like the leptons and the protons and neutrons made from quarks must obey Fermi–Dirac Statistics where the Pauli Exclusion Principle holds power; they cannot ever occupy the same quantum states at the same time.

Here is a simple and great analogy from Dr. Matthew Bobrowsky, Physics Professor at University of Maryland:

In the 1960s, Peter Higgs and a few other scientists proposed that there’s an energy field throughout the universe. This energy field is now called the “Higgs field.” The reason Higgs proposed this field is that no one yet understood why some particles have more mass than others.

The energy field that Peter Higgs proposed would interact with particles to give them their mass. The idea is that massive particles interact strongly with the field, low-mass particles interact with the field only weakly, and massless particles don’t interact with the field at all.

A good analogy for this is to consider things moving through water. The water represents the Higgs field. Some things (like fish) move through water very easily. These would be like low-mass particles. Other things (like me) don’t move through the water easily; so these are like high-mass particles — high-mass because they interact a lot with the water (Higgs field).

The lightest sub-atomic particle is the electron, and the most massive is the top quark. Its mass is about 350,000 times the mass of the electron — about the mass of a tungston atom. Interestingly, the top quark is not more massive because it’s bigger. It’s actually believed to be the same (infinitesimal) size as the electron. What makes the top quark more massive than the electron is simply that it interacts more strongly with the Higgs field. Now, what you’ve been hearing about is not the Higgs field, but the Higgs boson. What’s the connection? The Higgs boson is the tiniest piece of the Higgs field, just like a single H₂O molecule is the tiniest piece of water. So in our previous water analogy, the Higgs boson is to the Higgs field as a single water molecule is to a large ocean of water. Just as water is made of countless individual molecules, the Higgs field is made of countless Higgs bosons.

CONCLUSION? So, this Higgs Field is an "invisible" energy field that permeates all of space that is caused by the presence of Higgs Bosons (the force carrier) and causes particles in it to have "heft" or mass. With it, the Standard Model is all happy and fuzzy... Yea...

WAY COOL Animated Video on the Higgs From CERN!

Via APOD.

Catch-up Time! New Planets & Slow Neutrinos...

WOW. It's been almost 2 months since I've been here? Goes to show you how much time teaching takes out of your day... A few quick tidbits to catch up on recent sciency stuff:

1. It was the Cable Guy's Fault! CERN made a public announcement about a loose cable possibly being the culprit in the results that pointed to superluminal neutrinos last Fall. Seems a tech didn't attach an optic fiber cable to a computer securely. This computer was essential for interpreting time from a GPS system. Once that was found - coincidentally, not till AFTER they had run a 2nd testing and came up with the same results - it resulted in an additional 60μs; the exact amount of time the neutrinos had beaten light in a race through the earth... However, during the press conference I saw online at CERN.ch/, J Gillies said, and I seriously paraphrase here,

"The cable means the neutrinos got there later than we had originally measured. However, we found another problem with a synchronization of an extrapolated flux capacitor [my term since I don't know what the heck he actually said] that may indicate the neutrinos actually arrived sooner than we originally thought. So, what does this mean? Well, the neutrinos may have been slower than we said, the same speed as we said, or faster than we said..."

Yeah, thanks, Spanky. That really helps. Stay tuned. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel. I personally think this is an International conspiracy to hide the discovery of the Higgs-Boson and his lesser known little brothers, the Higgs-Moron and Higgs-Peon...

2. Super-Earth found. NASA reported earlier this month of an earth-like planet orbiting one member of a three-star system nearby. Found by Kepler, the orbiting planet-finder telescope thingee, the cleverly named GJ 667Cc is only 22 light-years away (practically in our astronomical backyard if not on the back deck...), is 4 times bigger than earth, and is in the "Goldilocks Zone" of habitation; not too cold, not too hot, just right. Space.com reports there are now 1497 exoplanet candidates with 709 solidly confirmed.

3. And talking about planets, it seems the planet GJ 1214b, first discovered in 2009, is a "waterworld". New info from Hubble indicates this planet, only twice as large as earth, is a steamy watery world. Although this water may not be the type you could comfortably jump into and enjoy on a summer day... From ScienceNews.com:

“It’s an exciting thing that we don’t have in our solar system,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer who divides her time between Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. “And it’s a fun puzzle trying to figure out what the atmosphere of that planet is really made of.”

New Doubts of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

From today's Science News Online, a few top-notch physicists, in two independent studies, have raised doubt (if not actually yelling "NO, YOU'RE WRONG"!!) about the CERN OPERA results that reported faster than light speed neutrinos. In the December 06 issues of Physical Review Letters, Xiaojun Bi, a particle astrophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, cries foul. Not only would superluminal particles slap Einstein in the face, they would also break the sacred Laws of Conservation of Energy and Momentum. Direct link to APS article. Membership required. Direct link to Cornell Archives PDF - FREE.

See, the CERN neutrinos had parents. Like most of us, these were unstable parents. However, unlike my dysfunctional Mother, the neutrinos from CERN were born from unstable pions. Turns out, these pions had an energy of about 3.5 times that of the resulting daughter neutrinos they decayed into. The energy and momentum laws dictate the resulting particles had to have subluminal (slower than light) speeds. This was reported by physicist Ramanath Cowsik of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues in the Dec. 16 Physical Review Letters. Direct link to Cornell Archive PDF - FREE.

So, what does this all mean? "Achieving the mind-boggling velocities measured by OPERA would have required pions with energies 20 times greater than their offspring, Cowsik’s team calculates. At such energies, though, the lifetimes of pions would be six times longer, which has been ruled out by measurements from OPERA and other experiments."

For Cowsik and other researchers, these problems and contradictions suggest that the laws of physics as currently understood are correct. But physicists will still be watching other neutrino experiments that can check OPERA’s result, which may be clouded by some unknown source of error. “No one is saying that the OPERA result is impossible, even though it would require extreme revisions to what we know about physics,” says Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist at Boston University. “But if it turns out to be true, I would say to Nature, ‘You win.’ Then I’d give up, and I’d retire.”

Stay tuned. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.

Well, lots of science news to catch you up on; Neutrinos faster than light, Michelle Bachman abuses science yet again, and sadly, the Tevatron shuts down. Lets do the Neutrino thing here and tackle those others later.

You've probably heard that the good physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, arguably the biggest and baddest lab on the planet, reported last month that they measured a batch of neutrinos (weird little buggers) moving faster than light. Well, this would certainly put a damper on our understanding of the Universe, because a basic tenant of modern physics and cosmology is that nothing can go faster than light. Not neutrinos. Not Jeff Gordon. Not the USS Enterprise. Nothing.

See CERN FINDS faster than light particles for more info. And here is the CERN press release.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail after realizing that the entire mess was a bad media interpretation of a CERN press release stating "Speed of Light Exceeded by Neutrinos"! Seems the "Neutrinos" were the winning relay race team at CERN's annual picnic. Speed of Light came in 3rd...

Seriously, lets hold our collective hats on this. Even the authors of the paper claim the results are crazy and they are not claiming that the speed of light has been broken. They are simply asking for help from the scientific community in finding an error or omission in their results that would explain this wacky thing.

Basically, they shot neutrinos in a straight line through the earth to another lab. The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Neutrinos are weird little sub-atomic particles that virtually never interact with matter since they are electrically neutral and have an incredibly idiodically small mass if any, so they basically "don't see" all that rock and stuff in the way; just go zipping through unimpeded. Some of them got to their target in France 730 km away 60 nano-seconds faster than light would have. Seems crazy. Probably is. My money is on someone somewhere finding an error or two in the data or assumptions made. Some of the basic measurements, like the exact distance to the target, were based on other folks' data. If they were wrong, then this result is wrong.

It's also not the 1st time this type of thing has made the news. Seems that every few years, someone "finds" something that they say might indicate Einstein was wrong. Only to be shot down upon scrutiny of peers. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Also, astrophysics argues with the CERN results. If this is correct, then the most studied supernova in history, 1987A, would have shown neutrinos streaming in from the supernova, some 168,000 light years away, years before the light got here. However, the light got here and then the neutrinos got here a few hrs later...