[HN Gopher] LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs b...
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LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay
Author : elashri
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-05-29 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.interactions.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.interactions.org)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| I've once read that almost every electro-magnetic interaction
| involving a photon also involves a Z boson, but given that it's
| massive, it decays very quickly. Is this true?
| cwillu wrote:
| https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
| has some understandable math showing how this happens, more or
| less. Note that it's at the _end_ of a series called "Fields
| and Their Particles, With Math", so you may want to skim it and
| then skip back closer to the beginning.
| efitz wrote:
| Why should I, as a taxpayer, want to my government to subsidize
| this research? I haven't seen anything useful come out of high
| energy particle physics in decades.
|
| This is an honest question, not a troll.
|
| I see lots of spin-off technologies coming out of other "big
| science". Consider space programs. We see materials technology
| coming out of space programs. I can even see the PR value in the
| space program as it appeals to our imagination and sense of
| exploration. I can even buy into the "time to make sure all our
| eggs aren't in one basket" theory of Musk et al for colonization
| of other planets. And I _love_ that companies are commercializing
| it rather than leaving it just to governments.
|
| But as a layperson, high energy particle physics seems like
| (figuratively and literally) pouring money down large holes to
| satisfy the curiosity of a few researchers. While it's mildly
| interesting it's practically inscrutable and very hard to connect
| to anything that normal people care about.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Cool research, but it's only 3.4s so far and this decay is
| already predicted by the Standard Model.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| I'm an airchair physics person so I'm curious how close my layman
| understanding of this matches reality... So Higgs particles don't
| exist under normal conditions, they're just proof that the Higgs
| field exists and explains how mass exists. When the energy that's
| perturbing the Higgs field dissipates it does so through other
| fields perturbing them to create one of their particles and so
| on.
|
| Sci-Fi or Fact or somewhere in the middle?
| cwillu wrote:
| This correlates very well with what Matt Strassler says:
|
| https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
|
| https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/the-higgs-p...
| lanza wrote:
| > So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions
|
| Eh. That's like saying fully constructed lego kits don't exist
| under normal conditions. Yea sure, my normal life conditions
| don't entail me having just finished putting together a lego
| rollercoaster. But calling that "normal conditions" is a weird
| way of describing the situation.
|
| I'm being kinda nitpicky, but as a physicist who understands
| the phenomena I'd just definitely never say "under normal
| conditions" here. The LHC just provides more potential
| interactions in a highly regular way and thus more
| opportunities to measure it.
|
| The Higgs boson is just heavy and unstable and less
| probabilistic to be created via most particle interactions.
|
| > So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions,
| they're just proof that the Higgs field exists and explains how
| mass exists
|
| This Higgs particle doesn't explain how mass exists. The
| construction that explains how mass works predicts that a Higgs
| boson exists.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'm another armchair physics layman, I'd thought it was
| something like a "virtual particle" which gets created and
| destroyed so quickly in the process of performing its very
| important duties (that is, making sure things act as if they
| have mass).
|
| The hard part being to isolate it and get it in an "observable"
| condition where you can actually see it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm an arm chair "arm chair physics layman", it seems like
| this will help with defining the meaning of the universe, and
| will await till this observation is useful enough to have
| real physicists explain this in layman terms
| tux3 wrote:
| Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is
| that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the
| time to bestow other particles their mass. So everything is
| able to consort with the Higgs field at any time without
| expending energy, because those are only background virtual
| Higgs, not full fledged particles with a sense of self
|
| You can also create bona-fide Higgs particles, but you have to
| put in a lot of energy to do it (like the LHC does), and it
| will proceed to immediately disintegrate into lighter
| particles, which is what the LHC is observing in detectors
|
| I think that when particles use the Higgs field to get their
| mass, the virtual particle is only a temporary ripple living on
| borrowed time, so it can interract with other fields but has to
| go back to nothing when the interaction is over, like a local
| variable in a function.
|
| When you have a real Higgs, if it decays into say two photons,
| then yes you have a wave in the Higgs field dissipating, while
| equal energy/charge/<other conserved quantities...> waves
| replace it in other fields
|
| (IANAP. This does not constitute physical advice.)
| lanza wrote:
| > Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding
| is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all
| the time to bestow other particles their mass.
|
| Physicist here: nope. The coupling between the Higgs field
| and other particle fields is what creates the phenomona of
| mass. The Higgs particle is just an excitation of that field.
|
| Virtual particles aren't "real" in the same way that the
| first order Taylor series of sin(x) being x doesn't max x a
| real sinusoidal wave. All it does is let you make your
| calculations "close enough" for your accepted definition of
| "close enough."
| tux3 wrote:
| Thanks! So if I understood you right, whatever coupling
| does to the fields, it's something doesn't involve virtual
| Higgs, is that right?
|
| Is it fair to say that both virtual Higgs and 'real' Higgs
| are two types of excitations of that field, except that
| virtual particles can't be directly observed?
|
| I find the name virtual particles interesting, since they
| don't seem to be exactly the same kind of ripples as
| particles, and physicists frequently seem to disagree on
| how 'real' they are as a matter of interpretation
| [deleted]
| RickyS wrote:
| Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs
| particles "they don't exist under normal condition" is loosely
| true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is
| nothing but a "quantum" of a "field". Fields pervade all
| physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta)
| simply represent a local state of observable things. A field
| can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a
| probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the
| vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be
| "extracted".
|
| The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is
| that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states
| (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction)
| only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is
| true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that
| the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of
| all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in
| general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos)
| through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the
| quanta of other particles.
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