## Higgs even more standard

02/09/2015

LHCP 2015 is going on at St. Peterburg and new results were presented by the two main collaborations at CERN. CMS and ATLAS combined the results from run 1 and improved the quality of the measured data of the Higgs particle discovered on 2012. CERN press release is here. I show you the main picture about the couplings between the Higgs field and the other particles in the Standard Model widely exposed in all the social networks

What makes this plot so striking is the very precise agreement with the Standard Model. Anyhow, the ellipses are somewhat large yet to grant new physics creeping in at run 2. My view is that the couplings, determining the masses of the particles in the Standard Model, are less sensible to new physics than the strength of the signal at various decays. Also this plot is available (hat tip to Adam Falkowski)

In this plot you can see that the Standard Model, represented by a star, is somewhat at the border of the areas of the ZZ and WW decays and that of the WW decay is making smaller. This does not imply that in the future deviations from the Standard Model will be seen here but leave the impression that this could happen in run 2 with the increasing precision expected for these measurements.

The strengths are so interesting because the Higgs sector of the Standard Model can be solved exactly with the propagator providing the values of them (see here). These generally disagree from those obtained by standard perturbation theory even if by a small extent. Besides, Higgs particle should have internal degrees of freedom living also in higher excited states. All of this to be seen at run 2 as the production rate of these states appears to be smaller as higher is their mass.

Run 2 is currently ongoing even if the expected luminosity will not be reached for this year. For sure, the next year summer conferences could provide a wealth of shocking new results. Hints are already seen by both the main collaborations and LHCb. Something new is just behind the corner.

Marco Frasca (2015). A theorem on the Higgs sector of the Standard Model arxiv arXiv: 1504.02299v1

## Particle physics at a dead end

02/06/2015

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio is one of the greatest Italian physicists and it is well-known for his contributions to quantum field theory and statistical physics. He belongs to the School of Rome that yielded three Boltzmann medallists: himself, Giorgio Parisi and Giovanni Gallavotti. His model, postulated together with Yoichiro Nambu, represents the right behaviour of quantum chromodynamics at very low energies and put the basis for the future understanding of broken symmetries in particle physics. Indeed, Jona-Lasinio took the Nobel medal on behalf of Nambu and presented also the lecture. Nambu could not go to Stockholm and so, the award passed by the hands of Jona-Lasinio. That year two Italian names were associated to that prize, the other one was Nicola Cabibbo. Jona-Lasinio has been one of my professors during my graduation course at University La Sapienza, together with Luciano Maiani and Nicola Cabibbo. I have got the best instruction and, of course, gaps are all mine. The School of Rome has been one of the main engines toward the complete realization of the Standard Model of particle physics as testified by the people I have just named. Then, most of these persons moved to statistical mechanics realizing great findings in this area and Jona-Lasinio was one of them. Sometime, he expressed some criticisms to particle physics as is practised today and in the last decades. This view is absolutely shareable and recently he presented it again in an interview to Asimmetrie (in Italian), the journal of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare on 17 January 2014. You can find the full interview here. The interview was in Italian but the part numbered as 11 yields the critical view. I give here a translation:

I see… Also young people… Now there is not a position for everybody, especially in Italy, it is become hyper-competitive and so, this is a sociological fact, a lot of works come out, for young people is important to publish a lot, a lot of works come out that differ each other, I say, by an epsilon, and so we say the level is lowered a lot of… of… It is exactly the contrary of what was happening then because then to not publish was considered a virtue and maybe to have more interests. Now, there is hyper-specialization instead. So, where physics goes I do not know. Particle physics that was always considered fundamental physics even if indeed, in the second half of ‘900, the most important progresses were in statistical mechanics and condensed matter rather than particle physics, and biology. But indeed now with the experiments, I do not believe that after the LHC other accelerators will be made. Then, one recurs to cosmology also to have information on particles, so this is indirect knowledge. Where it will end particle physics I do not know because there is this aura, that I consider artificially kept yet, because it uses a huge quantity of money and so there is the need to present itself with a façade always of big… so futuristic, but I have no idea where it will go.

It is a fact that particle physics has not seen a great revolution since the end of seventies of the last century and LHC is yet there to check that somewhat old physics. Standard Model developed on sixties and seventies of the last century and we can date back the Higgs mechanism to 1964, very few years after Nambu and Jona-Lasinio proposal. Supersymmetry, if will be ever seen, is old as eighties of last century. After this, we have lived our latest thirty years with metaphysics without any sound foundation from experiments. Rather speculations.  Some of these ideas become so strong to convince people that these are the truth with bad consequences for all the community. This is now a recurring attitude for physicists. In other periods, most of the papers that today appear as great advances would be considered rubbish as now we use to accept shaky foundations for brave proposals.

Let me conclude with the concluding remarks by Richard Feynman at Caltech on 1974:

So I have just one wish for you–the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

## NASA and warp drive: An update

25/04/2015

There is some excitement in the net about some news of Harold White’s experiment at NASA. I have uncovered it by chance at a forum. This is a well-frequented site with people at NASA posting on it and regularly updating about the work that they are carrying out. You can also have noticed some activity in the Wikipedia’s pages about it (see here at the section on EmDrive and here). Wikipedia’s section on EmDrive explains in a few lines what is going on. Running a laser inside the RF cavity of the device they observed an unusual effect. They do not know yet if this could be better explained by more mundane reasons like air heating inside the cavity itself. They will repeat the measurements in a vacuum chamber to exclude such a possibility. I present here some of the slides used by White to recount about this This is the current take by Dr. White as reported by one of his colleagues too prone to leak on nasaspaceflight forum:

…to be more careful in declaring we’ve observed the first lab based space-time warp signal and rather say we have observed another non-negative results in regards to the current still in-air WFI tests, even though they are the best signals we’ve seen to date. It appears that whenever we talk about warp-drives in our work in a positive way, the general populace and the press reads way too much into our technical disclosures and progress.

I would like to remember that White is not using exotic matter at all. Rather, he is working with strong RF fields to try to develop a warp bubble. This was stated here even if implicitly. Finally, an EmDrive device has been properly described here. Using strong external fields to modify locally a space-time has been described here. If this will be confirmed in the next few months, it will represent a major breakthrough in experimental general relativity since Eddington  confirmed the bending of light near the sun. Applications would follow if this idea will appear scalable but it will be a shocking result anyway. We look forward to hear from White very soon.

Marco Frasca (2005). Strong coupling expansion for general relativity Int.J.Mod.Phys.D15:1373-1386,2006 arXiv: hep-th/0508246v3

## That Higgs is trivial!

05/04/2015

Notwithstanding LHC has seen the particle, the Higgs sector of the Standard Model has some serious problems. This fact yielded more than one headache to physicists. One of these difficulties is called technically “triviality“. The scalar field theory, that is so well defined classically, does not exist as a quantum field theory unless is non-interacting. There is a wonderful paper by Michael Aizenman that shows that this is true for dimensions 5 and higher. So, one should think that, as we live in four dimensions, there is no reason to worry. The point is that Michael Aizenman left the question in four dimensions open. So, does Higgs particle exist or not and how does it yield mass if it will not interact? CERN said to us that Higgs particle is there and so, in some way, the scalar sector of the Standard Model must properly work. Aizenman’s proof was on 1981 but what is the situation now? An answer is in this article on Scholarpedia. As stated by the author Ulli Wolff

Triviality of lattice phi^4 theory in this sense has been rigorously proven for D>4 while for the most interesting borderline case D=4 we have only partial results but very strong evidence from numerical simulations.

While there is another great expert on quantum field theory, Franco Strocchi, in his really worth to read book saying

The recent proof of triviality of phi^4 in 3 + 1 spacetime dimensions indicates that the situation becomes worse in the real world, and in particular the renormalized perturbative series of the phi^4 model seems to have little to do with the non-perturbative solution.

We see that experts do not completely agree about the fact that a proof exists or not but, for sure, the scalar theory in four dimensions cannot interact and the Standard Model appears in serious troubles.

Before to enter more in details about this matter, let me say that, even if Strocchi makes no citation about where the proof is, he is the one being right. We have proof about this, the matter is now well understood and again we are waiting for the scientific community to wake up. Also, the Standard Model is surely secured and there is no serious risk about the recent discovery by CERN of the Higgs particle.

The proof has been completed recently by Renata Jora with this paper on arxiv. Renata extended the proof an all the energy range. I met her in Montpellier (France) at this workshop organized by Stephan Narison. We have converging interests in research. Renata’s work is based on a preceding proof, due to me and Igor Suslov, showing that, at large coupling, the four dimensional theory is indeed trivial. You can find the main results here and here. Combining these works together, we can conclude that Strocchi’s statement is correct but there is no harm for the Standard Model as we will discuss in a moment. Also the fact that the perturbation solution of the model is not properly describing the situation can be seen from the strictly non-analytical behaviours seen at strong coupling that makes impossible to extend what one gets at small coupling to that regime.

The fact that CERN has indeed seen the Higgs particle and that the Higgs sector of the Standard Model is behaving properly, unless a better understanding will emerge after the restart of the LHC, has been seen with the studies of the propagators of the Yang-Mills theory in the Landau gauge. The key paper is this where the behaviour of the running coupling of the theory was obtained on all the energy range from lattice computations.

This behaviour shows that, while the theory is trivial at both the extremes of the energy range, there is an intermediate regime where we can trust the theory and treat it as an effective one. There the coupling does not run to zero but moves around some finite non-null value. Of course, all this is just saying that this theory must be superseded by an extended one going to higher energies (supersymmetry? Technicolor?) but it is reasonable to manage the theory as if all this just works at current energies. Indeed, LHC has shown that a Higgs particle is there.

So, triviality is saying that the LHC will find something new for sure. Today, beams moved again inside the accelerator. We are eager to see what will come out form this wonderful enterprise.

Aizenman, M. (1981). Proof of the Triviality of Field Theory and Some Mean-Field Features of Ising Models for Physical Review Letters, 47 (12), 886-886 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.47.886

Renata Jora (2015). $Φ^4$ theory is trivial arXiv arXiv: 1503.07298v1

Marco Frasca (2006). Proof of triviality of $λφ^4$ theory Int.J.Mod.Phys.A22:2433-2439,2007 arXiv: hep-th/0611276v5

Igor M. Suslov (2010). Asymptotic Behavior of the \Beta Function in the Φ^4 Theory: A Scheme
Without Complex Parameters J.Exp.Theor.Phys.111:450-465,2010 arXiv: 1010.4317v1

I. L. Bogolubsky, E. -M. Ilgenfritz, M. Müller-Preussker, & A. Sternbeck (2009). Lattice gluodynamics computation of Landau-gauge Green’s functions in the deep infrared Phys.Lett.B676:69-73,2009 arXiv: 0901.0736v3

## New Lucasian Professor

19/03/2015

After a significant delay, Cambridge University made known the name of Michael Green‘s successor at the Lucasian chair. The 19th Lucasian Professor is Michael Cates, Professor at University of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society. Professor Cates is worldwide known for his researches in the field of soft condensed matter. It is a well deserved recognition and one of the best choice ever for this prestigious chair. So, we present our best wishes to Professor Cates of an excellent job in this new role.

## Standard Model at the horizon

08/12/2014

Hawking radiation is one of the most famous effects where quantum field theory combines successfully with general relativity. Since 1975 when Stephen Hawking uncovered it, this result has obtained a enormous consideration and has been derived in a lot of different ways. The idea is that, very near the horizon of a black hole, a pair of particles can be produced one of which falls into the hole and the other escapes to infinity and is seen as emitted radiation. The overall effect is to drain energy from the hole, as the pair is formed at its expenses, and its ultimate fate is to evaporate. The distribution of this radiation is practically thermal and a temperature and an entropy can be attached to the black hole. The entropy is proportional to the area of the black hole computed at the horizon, as also postulated by Jacob Bekenstein, and so, it can only increase. Thermodynamics applies to black holes as well. Since then, the quest to understand the microscopic origin of such an entropy has seen a huge literature production with the notable understanding coming from string theory and loop quantum gravity.

In all the derivations of this effect people generally assumes that the particles are free and there are very good reasons to do so. In this way the theory is easier to manage and quantum field theory on curved spaces yields definite results. The wave equation is separable and exactly solvable (see here and here). For a scalar field, if you had a self-interaction term you are immediately in trouble. Notwithstanding this, in  the ’80 Unruh and Leahy, considering the simplified case of two dimensions and Schwarzschild geometry, uncovered a peculiar effect: At the horizon of the black the interaction appears to be switched off (see here). This means that the original derivation by Hawking for free particles has indeed a general meaning but, the worst conclusion, all particles become non interacting and massless at the horizon when one considers the Standard Model! Cooper will have very bad times crossing Gargantua’s horizon.

Turning back from science fiction to reality, this problem stood forgotten for all this time and nobody studied this fact too much. The reason is that the vacuum in a curved space-time is not trivial, as firstly noted by Hawking, and mostly so when particles interact. Simply, people has increasing difficulties to manage the theory that is already complicated in its simplest form. Algebraic quantum field theory provides a rigorous approach to this (e.g. see here). These authors consider an interacting theory with a $\varphi^3$ term but do perturbation theory (small self-interaction) probably hiding in this way the Unruh-Leahy effect.

The situation can change radically if one has exact solutions. A $\varphi^4$ classical theory can be indeed solved exactly and one can make it manageable (see here). A full quantum field theory can be developed in the strong self-interaction limit (see here) and so, Unruh-Leahy effect can be accounted for. I did so and then, I have got the same conclusion for the Kerr black hole (the one of Interstellar) in four dimensions (see here). This can have devastating implications for the Standard Model of particle physics. The reason is that, if Higgs field is switched off at the horizon, all the particles will lose their masses and electroweak symmetry will be recovered. Besides, further analysis will be necessary also for Yang-Mills fields and I suspect that also in this case the same conclusion has to hold. So, the Unruh-Leahy effect seems to be on the same footing and importance of the Hawking radiation. A deep understanding of it would be needed starting from quantum gravity. It is a holy grail, the switch-off of all couplings, kind of.

Further analysis is needed to get a confirmation of it. But now, I am somewhat more scared to cross a horizon.

V. B. Bezerra, H. S. Vieira, & André A. Costa (2013). The Klein-Gordon equation in the spacetime of a charged and rotating black hole Class. Quantum Grav. 31 (2014) 045003 arXiv: 1312.4823v1

H. S. Vieira, V. B. Bezerra, & C. R. Muniz (2014). Exact solutions of the Klein-Gordon equation in the Kerr-Newman background and Hawking radiation Annals of Physics 350 (2014) 14-28 arXiv: 1401.5397v4

Leahy, D., & Unruh, W. (1983). Effects of a λΦ4 interaction on black-hole evaporation in two dimensions Physical Review D, 28 (4), 694-702 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.28.694

Giovanni Collini, Valter Moretti, & Nicola Pinamonti (2013). Tunnelling black-hole radiation with $φ^3$ self-interaction: one-loop computation for Rindler Killing horizons Lett. Math. Phys. 104 (2014) 217-232 arXiv: 1302.5253v4

Marco Frasca (2009). Exact solutions of classical scalar field equations J.Nonlin.Math.Phys.18:291-297,2011 arXiv: 0907.4053v2

Marco Frasca (2013). Scalar field theory in the strong self-interaction limit Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74:2929 arXiv: 1306.6530v5

Marco Frasca (2014). Hawking radiation and interacting fields arXiv arXiv: 1412.1955v1

## That’s a Higgs but how many?

17/11/2014

CMS and ATLAS collaborations are yet up to work producing results from the datasets obtained in the first phase of activity of LHC. The restart is really near the corner and, maybe already the next summer, things can change considerably. Anyway what they get from the old data can be really promising and rather intriguing. This is the case for the recent paper by CMS (see here). The aim of this work is to see if a heavier state of Higgs particle exists and the kind of decay they study is $Zh\rightarrow l^+l^-bb$. That is, one has a signature with two leptons moving in opposite directions, arising from the dacy of the $Z$, and two bottom quarks arising from the decay of the Higgs particle. The analysis of this decay aims to get hints of existence of a heavier pseudoscalar Higgs state. This can be greatly important for SUSY extensions of the Standard Model that foresee more than one Higgs particle.

Often CMS presents its results with some intriguing open questions and also this is the case and so, it is worth this blog entry. Here is the main result

The evidence, as said in the paper, is that there is a 2.6-2.9 sigma evidence at 560 GeV and a smaller one at around 300 GeV. Look elsewhere effect reduces the former at 1.1 sigma and the latter is practically negligible. Overall, this is pretty negligible but, as always, with more data at the restart, could become something real or just fade away. It should be appreciated the fact that a door is left open anyway and a possible effect is pointed out.

My personal interpretation is that such higher excitations do exist but their production rates are heavily suppressed with the respect to the observed ground state at 126 GeV and so, negligible with the present datasets. I am also convinced that the current understanding of the breaking of SUSY, currently adopted in MSSM-like to go beyond the Standard Model, is not the correct one provoking the early death of such models. I have explained this in a coupled of papers of mine (see here and here). It is my firm conviction that the restart will yield exciting results and we should be really happy to have such a powerful machine in our hands to grasp them.

Marco Frasca (2013). Scalar field theory in the strong self-interaction limit Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74:2929 arXiv: 1306.6530v5

Marco Frasca (2012). Classical solutions of a massless Wess-Zumino model J.Nonlin.Math.Phys. 20:4, 464-468 (2013) arXiv: 1212.1822v2