Is this test of the Standard Model impressive?

A week ago we had an interesting physics colloquium The Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider by Elizabetta Barberio, who works in the ATLAS detector collaboration.

It was nice to hear a talk about the Higgs boson which simply discussed the physics and the actual experimental results, without any hype.

To me one of the most interesting and impressive figures shown in the talk actually had nothing to do with the Higgs! I found it here on the CERN website.

It shows the measured cross sections for the production of different particle products (horizontal scale).
Note the vertical scale varies by four orders of magnitude.
Basically, it shows that the results from the ATLAS detector are consistent with the Standard Model.

One thing I would like to know is how many independent parameters (coupling constants) are involved in determining these cross sections from the Standard Model?
Is the agreement between experiment and theory impressive? Or are there so many parameters in the Standard Model that this plot is really just saying what those parameters are? But, all the cross sections can't be independent of one another.

The Higgs boson enters cocktail party chit-chat

It is amazing to me how much the Higgs boson has featured in the press and entered the public consciousness lately. I fear this is partly because CERN has such a large and effective press office. This was particularly brought home to me when my wife sent me the above cartoon which one of her friends had posted on Facebook.

On the one hand, I think it is good that physics is getting all this publicity. On the other hand I think the scientific significance of this discovery is being blown out of proportion, driven by the large budgets involved....

Clarifying the origins of mass and the Higgs boson

There is a nice article by Frank Close, Higgs boson: beginning of the end or end of the beginning.
It gives a succinct discussion of the background to the recent discovery and what it does and does not mean for elementary particle physics.

A couple of points I found helpful.
Reports in the media that "the Higgs boson is responsible for mass" are misleading.

First, almost all the mass in our bodies comes from neutrons and protons, and more than 99% of their mass comes from the binding energy of quarks (due to quantum chromodynamics) and not from the mass of isolated quarks.
The latter are hypothesized to get their mass from the Higgs field.
[Aside: the boson and the field are not the same thing. The boson is one specific excitation of the field].

Secondly, the CERN experiments do not establish that leptons and quarks obtain their mass from the Higgs field. Rather, only that the gauge bosons in electro-weak theory obtain their mass from the Higgs field.
Further experiments at CERN in the next few years may establish this though.

But, the existence of the Higgs field is relevant to chemistry in the following sense. Nuclei are so compact because of the large energy of pions, which is a reflection of the mass of quarks. Furthermore, the size of hydrogen atom is determined by the
mass of the electron.

Quantum physics as a political metaphor

There is a somewhat amusing column Our Political Black Hole in the New York Times by Gail Collins. It considers the fictional response of US presidential candidates to the discovery of the Higgs boson. I found it somewhat amusing, but in someways it is a bit painfully close to the truth.
This is a bit how I feel when I watch the classic BBC political comedy, Yes Minister.

Perhaps Gail Collins use of physics metaphor was inspired by David Javerbaum's earlier NYT column A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney.

The LHC makes me yawn

This post may just reflect my ill informed prejudices. Please correct me.
Sorry, but I cannot get excited about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I find it hard to see how it is going to reveal the secrets to the universe, or even to produce new scientific insights comparable to the expense and effort involved.

First, I find it hard to believe that the Higgs boson will not be found. My limited knowledge of particle physics and the standard model is that it just has to be there. Spontaneous symmetry breaking and the associated dynamical mass generation is well established in other areas of physics (e.g. the Meissner effect in superconductors can be viewed as photons acquiring mass, as first emphasized by Anderson). Hence, I won't be surprised if it also works / is present in the Standard model via the Higgs boson.

On the one hand, the LHC (search for the Higgs boson) is an experiment that should certainly be done, in a world in with almost unlimited resources for science.
On the other hand, I remain to be convinced that the LHC is a much better investment than "tabletop science." The latter has produced Graphene, violations of Bell inequalities, spin ice, fractional statistics in the quantum Hall effect, and cuprate superconductors. To me anyone of those is of comparable importance to confirming the Higgs boson is really there.

An earlier post considered the second of Two questions physics can no longer avoid, asked by Martin Gutzwiller in a Letter to Physics Today, published in August 1994.

His first question was, "Has particle physics fulfilled its promise?"

Spin ice on prime time TV

In condensed matter one can see many analogues of phenomena in quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. There have been many fruitful illustrations of cross-fertilisation over the years: symmetry breaking, renormalisation, fractional quantum numbers, vortices, confinement by gauge fields, .....
This raises controversial questions about which is more fundamental? Afterall, if the Higgs boson is just the analogue of gauge symmetry breaking in superconductors, why spend all that money on the LHC...

Last week I watched a great episode of The Big Bang Theory, "The Vengeance Formulation" [Season 3, Episode 9]. It features some cool condensed matter physics. Sheldon, who is enamoured with string theory is interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) for the show Science Friday.

Leonard: Are you really going to be on NPR?
Sheldon: Yes, they’re interviewing me by phone from my office, regarding the recent so-called discovery of magnetic monopoles in spin-ices. It’s pledge week and they’re trying to goose the ratings with a little controversy.

[Complete dialogue is here].

The Big Blog Theory gives a good summary of the science issues, suggesting Sheldon is having a go at two papers that appeared in Science at the same time as the episode was filmed. Michel Gringas wrote a Perspective piece on the two Science papers.