Podcast of Interview About the Higgs at CERN

If you want to listen to an interview from National Public Radio's (NPR) Science Friday, check this out. They talk about the Higgs boson search at CERN with one of the co-spokesman for the CMS experiment, one of the two big collider experiments at CERN looking for the Higgs (and many other things).

Also, here is a neat way to think about what the Higgs field does. It comes from http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~djm/higgsa.html:

" The Higgs Mechanism
Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime- Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is, she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is harder to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted. In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the clustering of the field around the particle - generates the particle's mass. The idea comes directly from the Physics of Solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron. The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the Weak Interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries Electromagnetic forces is massless. "
- David Miller

Possible New Particle Discovered at Doc V's old Stomping Ground

This link was found by Judah:

Well, Nature never sits still, and a possible new particle was found at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), my old experiment. A bump in the data suggests a new particle, one that, if real, no one yet has a clear understanding of what it is. It is almost certainly not the Higgs boson that has been searched for for decades. Some suggest it could be a new type of force-carrying particle, for some new interaction that occurs in nuclei. It is also a '3-sigma' event, where there is a fraction of a percent uncertainty that it could be a statistical fluctuation in the data. At 3 standard deviations from the mean, there is a 99.9% chance of being an actual discovery, and a 0.1% chance of being a random blip in the data...but that is still large enough to be skeptical when doing research at the professional level.

What is next? More data is needed to continue to reduce the size of the uncertainties (i.e. to reduce the error bars) to see if the bump either is enhanced, or if it smooths out, which would mean a likely random fluctuation. A second part of this is, ideally, to have a second, independent group check and see if they find the same bump at the same mass. Either D0 at Fermilab or the CERN experiments would be able to do this. We will hear more about this over the next months, but it is exciting nonetheless to see the scientific process in action!

End of an Era in U.S. Science - Shutting Down Tevatron

As I had feared, another area of science in the U.S., which the U.S. has led the world since WWII, high energy particle physics, is about to end. The Tevatron, the main accelerator at Fermilab, outside Chicago, is scheduled to shut down later this year. This machine used to hold the world record for energy (for a couple decades) at nearly 2 trillion volts per beam. Being a national laboratory, the main funding for Fermilab comes through the Department of Energy, and due to budgetary cuts to fight the $1.5 trillion federal deficit, funding will not continue.

While this was expected, I cannot help but have mixed feelings about this one. I spent 4 years involved with the Collider Detector Facility (CDF) experiment while in graduate school at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and have many fond memories of the many colleagues and friends I worked with as I earned my doctorate with CDF data. It was very exciting to be part of the celebration of the discovery of the top quark in 1994-5. I also wonder what will happen to the thousands of people who are employed through Fermilab. It is an end of an era, to be sure.