## Higgs: Tevatron confirms CERN findings

07/03/2012

In these days, at Moriond (La Thuile indeed, a great ski station) on Italian Alps, a conference is held (see here). Today is the Higgs day and people at Tevatron confirmed the clues found by CERN and announced last December. Higgs particle mass should be around 125 GeV. This has being reverberated on the media (see here). The evidence found at Tevatron is about two sigma (one percent probability that is not a fluctuation in the data) and so, one cannot claim a discovery and well below the three sigma evidence from CERN. For a final word we will have to wait summer conferences and new data from the restart of LHC at April.

Update: Here is Fermilab press release.

Update: Matt Strassler is pointing out in his blog that ATLAS has now a lower evidence for the Higgs particle than in last December. This seems something like the fluctuation of the last summer. Evidence for this would be now 10%.

## What’s going on with Higgs particle?

03/08/2011

The aftermath of the EPS Conference is quite exciting on a side. Higgs hunting points to an unexpected direction even if some residuals of an old expectation are still there. I just want to show you the graphs of this conference from Tevatron and LHC

From these it is very clear that the excluded range of mass is become significantly large restricting the possibilities to the intervals of a mass around 140 GeV or to a massive Higgs implying a strongly coupled theory. The evidence for a 140 GeV Higgs particle is yet small, about two sigmas, and we cannot exclude that this is a fluke but, to support this clue, it appears both at Tevatron and LHC. A small peak at around 250 GeV is seen only by ATLAS and could disappear in the future.

What I would like to emphasize here is that the possibility of a strongly coupled Higgs is well alive and this can have deep implications for the model and physics at large. There are several reasons for this. First of all, a strongly coupled Higgs field implies supersymmetry (see here). This result is inescapable and some breaking pattern of supersymmetry must be devised to get the right mass spectrum of the Standard Model. But this is already old and well-acquired matter. The most important point is that there will be a completely new way to approach quantum field theory. So far, quantum field theory has been managed just using weak perturbation theory but a strongly coupled Higgs would mean that we will also have to devise a perturbative technique the other way round, i.e. with a coupling increasingly large.

So, I will keep on support this view of a heavy Higgs as, being a theoretical physicist, consequences will be devastating and largely more exciting of any other possibility. We will be eager to see the improvement in the next months from the measurement datasets. Certainly, on 2012 all the curtains will be definitely down.

Marco Frasca (2010). Mass generation and supersymmetry arXiv arXiv: 1007.5275v2

## CDF bump at 4.8 sigma!

01/06/2011

In these days I am exceeding with exclamation marks but let me say that there are sound reasons for this. I will keep on staying on a prudence line as my more renowned colleagues are doing but there is a talk by Giovanni Punzi, the spokesman of CDF Collaboration at Tevatron, (see here), presenting the following picture

They increased the number of events and the bump is still there. They have consistently found $147\pm 5 GeV$ for the mass of this presumed particle. Of course, we have to wait for D0 and LHC to confirm this finding but this is becoming more and more a real discovery. But since the first inception, theoretical physicists have come out with possible explanations, the most reasonable of these seems a new U(1) interaction with Z’ leptophobic boson, where leptophobic just means that this particle has essentially strong decay modes. People at CDF has discarded several possible mundane explanations that emerged at the dawn of the first announcement but, as my readers know, it should be stated that our current understanding of low-energy QCD is somewhat in development and some modeling used by people at CERN or Tevatron can be not so accurate. My personal view is that is time to wait yet notwithstanding the good news.

For more relevant posts see here, here and here.

Kingman Cheung, & Jeonghyeon Song (2011). Baryonic Z’ Explanation for the CDF Wjj Excess arXiv arXiv: 1104.1375v3

## A simpler explanation for the CDF bump

20/04/2011

A lot of fuss arose about the recent almost finding of a new particle at Tevatron (see here). Several exotic hypotheses were put forward mostly looking for physics beyond Standard Model. Of course, being there such a bump at about $3\sigma$, we cannot yet cry out for a discovery and more mundane explanations could exist.

Indeed, this is the content of this paper appeared on arXiv. These authors point out some weak points in the analysis done by CDF that amount in the end at an imperfect estimation of the background. This is also my claim as strong interactions are not completely under control. I give here authors’ conclusions for your considerations:

In conclusion, we observe that the dijet invariant mass peak seen in the recent CDF Wjj cross section is completely consistent with the excess observed in the CDF single-top-quark analysis. Both may be explained by an upward fluctuation in the CDF data set of s-channel single-top-quark production, and t-channel production accompanied by an additional low-energy jet. The latter process is poorly modeled by Monte Carlo, and the apparent t-channel excess could simply be an artifact of theoretical uncertainty. Given the modest excess observed by the D0 Collaboration in their single-top-quark data set , we predict the D0 Collaboration would not see a significant dijet invariant mass peak if they follow the CDF procedure.

So, Standard Model strikes back again.

CDF Collaboration, & T. Aaltonen (2011). Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a
W boson in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV arXiv arXiv: 1104.0699v1

Zack Sullivan, & Arjun Menon (2011). A standard model explanation of a CDF dijet excess in Wjj arXiv arXiv: 1104.3790v1

## A new particle at Fermilab?

06/04/2011

I am a registered reader at New York Times and subscribed Dennis Overbye‘s articles. So, this morning I received the mail from the journal with a new writing from Dennis. The title is “At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths”. I just jumped on my chair and then, eagerly, read the article. Indeed, CDF Collaboration posted a paper on arXiv last night (see here). The kind of process that they studied is the one with a final diboson (WW or WZ) from a lepton plus jets. They analyzed the invariant mass for masses higher than $100\ GeV/c^2$. They get a $3\sigma$ excess in the region $120-160\ GeV/c^2$ that, if confirmed, should correspond to a new particle. Some tests seem  to point toward a non-Standard Model particle having a mass of $150\ GeV/c^2$ that cannot be identified with Higgs.

As always, it is important to emphasize the this is a $3\sigma$ evidence and further analysis is needed to confirm or disprove the discovery. But it is important to emphasize that Tevatron is paving the way to a large number of discoveries to be seen soon at LHC.

Update: CDF will present these results at a seminar. We can follow it on the web here.

Another update: A post by Tommaso Dorigo, one of the authors of the CDF paper, is here.

CDF Collaboration, & T. Aaltonen (2011). Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a
W boson in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV arXiv arXiv: 1104.0699v1

## The Tevatron affair and the “fat” gluon

25/01/2011

Tevatron is again at the forefront of the blogosphere mostly due to Jester and Lubos. Top quark seems the main suspect to put an end to the domain of the Standard Model in particle physics. Indeed, years and years of confirmations cannot last forever and somewhere some odd behavior must appear. But this is again an effect at 3.4 sigma and so all could reveal to be a fluke and the Standard Model will escape again to its end. But in the comment area of the post in the Lubos’ blog there is a person that pointed out my proposal for a “fat” gluon. “Fat” here stays just for massive and now I will explain this idea and its possible problems.

The starting point is the spectrum of Yang-Mills theory that I have obtained recently (see here and here). I have shown that, at very low energies, the gluon field has a propagator proportional to

$G(p)=\sum_{n=0}^\infty(2n+1)\frac{\pi^2}{K^2(i)}\frac{(-1)^{n+1}e^{-(n+\frac{1}{2})\pi}}{1+e^{-(2n+1)\pi}}\frac{1}{p^2-m_n^2+i\epsilon}$

with the spectrum given by

$m_n=\left(n+\frac{1}{2}\right)\frac{\pi}{K(i)}\sqrt{\sigma}$

being $\sigma$ the string tension being about $(440\ MeV)^2$. If we go beyond the leading order of such a strong coupling expansion one gets that the masses run with momenta. This has been confirmed on the lattice quite recently by Orlando Oliveira and Pedro Bicudo (see here). The interesting point about such a spectrum is that is not bounded from above and, in principle, one could take n large enough to reach TeV energies. These glueballs are very fat indeed and could explain CDF’s results if these should be confirmed by them, their colleagues at D0 and LHC.

It should be emphasized that these excitations of the glue field have spin zero and so will produce t-tbar pairs in a singlet state possibly explaining the charge asymmetry through the production rate of such very massive glueballs.

A problem can be seen immediately from the form of the propagator that has each contribution in the sum exponentially smaller as n increases. Indeed, this has a physical meaning as this is also what appears in the decay constants of such highly massive gluons (see here). Decay constants are fundamental in the computation of cross sections and if they are very near zero so could be the corresponding cross sections. But Oliveira and Bicudo also showed that these terms in the propagator depend on the momenta too, evading the problem at higher energies. Besides, I am working starting from the low energy part of the theory and assuming that such a spectrum will not change too much at such high energies where asymptotic freedom sets in and gluons seem to behave like massless particles. But we know from the classical theory that a small self-interaction in the equations is enough to get masses for the field and massless gluons are due to the very high energies we are working with. For very high massive excitations this cannot possibly apply. The message I would like to convey with this analysis is that if we do not know the right low-energy behavior of QCD we could miss important physics also at high-energies. We cannot live forever assuming we can forget about the behavior of Yang-Mills theory in the infrared mostly if the mass spectrum is not bounded from above.

Finally, my humble personal conviction, also because I like the idea behind Randall-Sundrum scenario, is that KK gluons are a more acceptable explanation if these CDF’s results will prove not to be flukes. The main reason to believe this is that we would obtain for the first time in the history of mankind a proof of existence for other dimensions and it would be an epochal moment indeed. And all this just forgetting what would imply for me to be right…

Frasca, M. (2008). Infrared gluon and ghost propagators Physics Letters B, 670 (1), 73-77 DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2008.10.022

Frasca, M. (2009). Mapping a Massless Scalar Field Theory on a Yang–Mills Theory: Classical Case Modern Physics Letters A, 24 (30) DOI: 10.1142/S021773230903165X

P. Bicudo, & O. Oliveira (2010). Gluon Mass in Landau Gauge QCD arxiv arXiv: 1010.1975v1

Frasca, M. (2010). Glueball spectrum and hadronic processes in low-energy QCD Nuclear Physics B – Proceedings Supplements, 207-208, 196-199 DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysbps.2010.10.051

## CERN and Fermilab have blogs!

12/01/2011

A few lines just to let you know that the most important laboratories of high-energy physics around the World have finally their blogs. I have added them to my blogroll and for your help I put the links here too:

CERN

Fermilab

So, stay tuned and enjoy!