I did get some d0 folks upset by posting about it. Let’s say that they would be happy to deny me a position if I applied at their institution. But it does not stop there, because there are a lot of people out there who do not like what I have been doing. Some of them are influential physicists. I got some indirect hints that I should stop blogging altogether. But I think what I do is useful, interesting, and I like doing it, so the hell with that.

No, I disagree about the marking time argument – if nothing comes out during this summer (and it isn’t) at conferences, it was quite probably a wild rumor based on some first look at new data before taking into account some subtle bias. That is exactly why many think this “rumor spreading” is bad for science. I think it is not, but it is beyond the point.

Cheers,
T.

Click on
–
Science blog
impunv.wordpress.com
or
impunv.blogspot.com

Political blog
randomabsurdities.wordpress.com

for explanation. Ignore the politics unless you like nasty remarks about Bush.

There does seem to be something to the rumour. Every day we don’t hear something makes it more likely that the bump is real. If this turns out to be the case, there is little chance that it is the Higgs. A mass of 180 GeV is just too big. It’s much more likely to be something else, most likely one of the superpartners.

Cheers,
T.

Dennis Overbye is an excellent science writer, and he understood that he needed to be careful… He interviewed several players and his article is indeed accurate and interesting.

Cheers,
T.

You guys are getting some good press. I read the NY Times article today, and I’m glad the author translated what you do into layman’s language. Good luck on the Quest.

I don’t wish to discourage anyone from searching for the theory of everything. I simply wonder if it isn’t likely that no matter how far we look, finding answers along the way, perhaps each answer will forever lead to another question. If it did not, would we not be disappointed?

It is in the best part of our nature to wonder. May we always follow virtue and knowledge.

Thanks,

Andy

thanks for visiting. Yes, it is possible that physics will never solve the puzzle of the theory of everything. Current candidates, in fact, are like the Undead of 3rd category movies…

I however disagree with your statement that we would be insulting anything, our mind or our god, if we found the ultimate answer. First of all, I do think there is an answer. And second, I think it is both possible and necessary for mankind to try and find it. As Dante puts it, “Fatte non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza”.

Cheers,
T.

I love this dictum, attributed to Nicolas of Cusa, but probably is much older: “Deus est sphaera infinita cujus centrum est ubique circumfrentia nusquam. “

To answer your questions, yes, D0 has made a preliminary Z0->bb signal public last year. It was about 1700 events, extracted by a technique using single and double tagging ratios in some fancy combination. You can see the signal discussed in http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/the-mssm-higgs-signal-buried-in-my-plot/ and links therein, or just go to the D0 public results page http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/higgs.htm (the result on Z->bb is down the list a bit).

I think the multijet sample used by D0 in their searches is collected by a trigger requiring three clusters, some Ht, and a global impact parameter condition at level 3. That, at least, was used in the bbb MSSM search made public last year. However that might have been improved recently.

Cheers,
T.

1. Has D0 ever shown a Z->bb peak?
2. Are these types of events efficiently collected by straightforward high-pT triggers, or do they benefit substantially from b-triggers?

Thanks…

well, I think that if the LHC does not provide an observation of a Higgs boson, nor any explanation of the inner workings of the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking -or if you want, the origin of mass- then it would be really hard to put together a stance for a new machine. So it might still be worthwhile to look for something else, but we might not be able to do it…

To answer your question from another point of view, if the LHC fails to find a higgs boson it means it is not there, so we might need to start looking for something quite different.

Cheers,
T.

thank you for your interesting comment.
To answer your question, I think that if a signal were seen, it would indeed be most likely attributed to a MSSM Higgs, because that theory is all the rage these days. That, despite the fact that one does not really know until one measures much more of the bosonic sector.

Cheers,
T.

So I think that a significant signal with twice more data may only be possible with a tan(beta) of the same order of magnitude, or with a completely revolutionized analysis. The latter is not impossible, but I find it hard to believe that one can gain more than a factor of three in sensitivity from an already well-done analysis. So we would be looking at a signal compatible with a quite large tan(beta). But this assumes several things we do not know about the analysis.

Cheers,
T.

Assuming that the rumored D0 signal turns out to be a real 180 GeV Higgs, do you think that consideration will be given to non-supersymmetric interpretations
such as
the composite Tquark condensate model of Hashimoto, Tanabashi, and Yamawaki,
who published in hep-ph/0311165 a prediction of a Higgs at 176-188 GeV ?

They used a T-quark condensate model in 8-dimensional spacetime with 4 compact dimensions. They said:

“… The idea of the top quark condensate explains naturally the large top mass of the order of the electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) scale. In … this idea often called the “top mode standard model” (TMSM), the scalar bound state of tbar-t plays the role of the Higgs boson in the SM. …
the SM gauge bosons and the third generation of quarks and leptons live in the … 8-dimensional bulk, while the first and second generations are confined in the … 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time …
… We predict masses of the top (m_t) and the Higgs (m_H) …
based on the renormalization group for the top Yukawa and Higgs quartic couplings with the compositeness conditions at the scale where the bulk top condenses …
for …[ Kaluza-Klein type ]… dimension… D=8 …
m_t = 172-175 GeV
and
m_H=176-188 GeV …”.

My fear is the the supersymmetry industry will seize the MSSM possibility and generate so much hype that non-supersymmetric alternatives will be ignored in follow-up theoretical research and analysis, even though the Hashimoto-Tanabashi-Yamawaki model is very concrete and predicted the 180 GeV Higgs mass.

Tony Smith

PS – I am posting a similar comment on the blog of Gordon Watts, because he is at D0. I hope that it is OK to do that.