White dwarf stars have relativistic effects on spacetime, so they may be used to test the Higgs-gravity relationship that should be occurring.
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When the World Went Higgs Boson Crazy: Photos
View Caption + #1: Discovery, At Last?
July 3, 2012 -- It seems that the Higgs boson just keeps bringing out the crazy in people. As we get closer and closer to cornering the secretive particle, there's been no shortage of myths, rumors and just downright odd (yet physically sound) theories to add some entertaining sideshows to the proceedings. So, this week, physicists who are working tirelessly with CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, have a big announcement. But will it be the announcement we've all been waiting for? In typical quantum physics style, a definite discovery announcement will be unlikely -- but we are slowly, yet surely, closing in on the particle's hiding place. While we wait for that precious "5-sigma" result, here are some peculiar Higgs stories and odd boson facts that have entertained, mystified and confused us ever since the LHC revved up its superconducting magnets.
Image: A plot of Tevatron (Fermilab) data sho
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Not the "God Particle" Let's get this crime of physics out of the way first. The hunt for the Higgs boson has nothing to do with God. The Higgs is not a divine entity; it is a gauge boson -- i.e. it is a particle that mediates mass and therefore endows all matter with (you guessed it) mass. (And no, that's not mass as in "religious service mass;" it's mass, a "property of matter mass.") So why the heck do we see, with alarming regularity, the "God Particle" reference plastered across every tabloid newspaper? Ever since Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi gave the elusive particle the tongue-in-cheek moniker in their 1993 book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" mainstream media grabbed hold of the nickname as if physicists were looking for The Almighty himself. Alas, the hunt for the Higgs has nothing to do with God, but it is a critical step forward in our understanding of what gives all matter in the Universe its mass. Of course, if the tabloid press mentions the "God Particle" as an ironic or sarcastic reference, that's fine. Physicists have a sense of humor too.
Credit: Delta Publishing
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There's a Higgs Family?! In 2010, physicists at the DZero collaboration at Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator came up with an interesting proposition: What if there are actually five different types of Higgs bosons? Perhaps old Higgsy has a mom, dad and twin sisters! Known as the "two-Higgs doublet model," the mere hint that there may be more Higgs particles to hunt down will likely make any particle physicist sweat, but it would explain some of the strange science results coming from the DZero collaboration. According to Discovery News' Jennifer Ouellette, this has potential implications for the "God Particle" misinterpretation: "Along with many physicists, I hate the term 'god particle' to describe the Higgs," says Ouellette. "Fermilab's Leon Lederman coined the term over a decade ago, and it's been misleading innocent civilians ever since into thinking physicists are trying to prove or disprove the existence of god or something. But it did give the blog 80 Beats the best line yet about these new results: 'If the Higgs boson is the God Particle, then some particle physicists just turned polytheistic.'"
Credit: Fermilab
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It Has An App Like everything else in the Universe, the Higgs particle has its own app. Naturally, LHC physicists are the villains of the game and you have to use other Standard Model particles to hide the Higgs from detection. You may not need a Ph.D. to play the game, but a vague understanding of quantum particles might help.
Credit: Test Tube Games
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God Hates It It seems that the longer a particle evades detection, the more stir-crazy some scientists become. This may not be an established law of physics, but it certainly seems to be the case for one distinguished physicist who, in 2009, published a lighthearted paper about why the Higgs is so difficult to find. The upshot: God hates the Higgs boson. What's with all the 'God' references? In a nutshell, as the Higgs boson can transmit a signal back in time when it is created by a particle accelerator, this signal will ultimately sabotage the accelerator before the thing has even been built. Nature, and therefore "God," doesn't want old Higgsy to see the light of day. Dennis Overbye of the New York Times summarized the situation quite nicely: "...the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one."
Image: The massive CMS detector in the LHC. C
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It's a Time-Traveling Assassin Reading like the plot of Jean-Claude Van Damme's 1994 movie "Timecop," the Higgs boson's time-traveling capabilities may be used for evil. Yes, it could go back in time to kill your grandfather. Or, at least, a signal utilizing the Higgs' time-traveling capabilities could be used to send a signal back in time to an assassin who is waiting for the signal to start a killing spree. Actually, that might really be the sequel to Timecop. This time-traveling Higgs theory was thought up by Vanderbilt University theoretical physicists Tom Weiler and Chui Man who admit their idea "is a long shot," but it "doesn't violate any laws of physics." Yay physics! Based on the theory that when a Higgs particle is generated a Higgs "singlet" particle is also generated at the same time, this singlet can utilize the "fifth dimension" of spacetime to zip through time and travel into the past. According to Weiler and Man's calculations, this could allow a Higgs singlet signal to be sent back in time, and could therefore be used for all kinds of freaky shenanigans.
Image: A simulation of the production and dec
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It's a Social Media Superstar It may come as no surprise that the Higgs boson has become something of a celebrity. Even though the vast majority of the public have no clue what the Higgs boson actually is, the hypothetical particle has become more popular than Lindsey Lohan and, for a time, was a trending topic alongside Lady Gaga and... Santa. True story. As we've already mentioned, the myth of the Higgs has often been a little more exaggerated than the truth, so in the spirit of "going viral," old Higgsy had its own meme on Twitter. Using the hashtag #HiggsRumors, hundreds of Higgs fans -- evidently exacerbated by the flurry of half-truths and rumored discoveries -- invented their own rumors about the elusive particle. It all began when @drskyskull tweeted: "I hear the Higgs boson once shot a man just to watch him die. #HiggsRumors" The rest, as they say, is social media history. CERN is expected to make its announcement about the possible Higgs boson confirmation on July 3. For updates, keep an eye on Discovery News and the @Discovery_Space Twitter feed. MORE ARTICLES BY IAN O'NEILL
Mass and gravity are intimately related, so it stands to reason that the link between the Higgs boson (and, by extension the “Higgs field”) and gravity is just as fundamental. Now astronomers are looking to the stars to actually test the finer details of this relationship.
The Higgs boson was discovered by an international collaboration of physicistsstudying data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012. The discovery of this ‘missing piece’ of the Standard Model led to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, the two leading physicists who theorized the existence of the particle in the 1960s, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013.
The boson’s discovery was profound. This experimental proof of a Standard Model Higgs boson not only galvanized current theories, but also canceled out a number of more exotic explanations for our quantum universe.
Now that we’re getting familiar with the Higgs boson, astronomers are keen to see how the Higgs field may couple with a specific type of spacetime curvature — one that is predicted by an extension of the Standard Model.
“Conceptually, I think that our work is trying to create a ‘common’ language between microphysics and macrophysics in the following sense,” Roberto Onofrio at the University of Padova in Italy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, told Phys.org.
So far, argues Onofrio, physicists have only studied the Higgs field in the quantum realm, but to test Higgs theory over macro scales, we need to find out how the Higgs field impacts gravity so we can check for “consistency or for the presence of possible contradictions.”
In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Onofrio and co-author Gary A. Wegner at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., discuss the possibility of studying emission spectra from white dwarfs, the small and dense remains of burnt-out sun-like stars. Massive stellar objects have significant effects on the curvature of spacetime, but to test how the Higgs field impacts the gravitational effects of these objects, white dwarfs are preferable (over neutron stars and black holes, for example) as their emission spectra can be studied through the light they generate.
For there to be a Higgs-gravity relationship, there should be a specific shift in the electronic spectrum from a white dwarf when compared with the vibrational spectrum that relates to nucleons. This basically means that if the Higgs field has any coupling effect with spacetime curvature, it will preferentially shift the spectrum of the emission lines from electrons than that of the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of atoms.
The reasoning is based on the fact that nucleons are bound together by another type of boson — the gluon — which mediates the strong force. The gluon is massless, so it therefore does not interact with the Higgs field (as the Higgs field endows matter with mass, so if a particle is massless, it cannot interact with the Higgs field); there is no addition to the nuclei inertial mass (i.e. the base masses of the protons and neutrons in the nulcei). But the electron is a fermion and it does have mass, so therefore interacts with the Higgs field and adding this extra mass to the electron’s inertial mass. This is why the electronic emission line may get shifted by a Higgs-gravity coupling, whereas the nucleon emission line cannot.
Through the study of emission lines from the stars BPM 27606 and Procyon B, the researchers have not, so far, detected the preferential shifting of the electron emission lines, but they have set the first upper bounds on Higgs-gravity coupling in an astrophysical environment. This first search has therefore set out a methodology for future surveys of other white dwarf stars so they could, potentially, be used as stellar Higgs field laboratories.
Source: Phys.org