A Quantum Diaries Survivor

The D0 collaboration has just finished a nice new analysis of 1 inverse femtobarn of Run II data, looking for direct production of Higgs bosons with a decay to W boson pairs.

At the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, Higgs bosons are mainly produced, if they exist, in two ways: directly in the hard scattering of the colliding bodies, or in associated production by radiating off vector bosons. Direct  production is ten times more “frequent” -say, twice a day on a good day of running!- than associated or  production, but the two processes have different atouts, and both need to be exploited if the Tevatron experiments are to stand a chance of discovering the particle before LHC does.

The slide below, which I dug out of a talk I gave in La Thuile a couple of years ago, shows all there is to know about Higgs production at the Tevatron: the top right plot shows the various decay modes of Higgs bosons as a function of its mass, and their relative frequency; the plot on the lower left shows the production rate of Higgs bosons in direct and associated modes, and the one on the lower right shows the Feynman diagrams for direct (top) and associated (bottom) production.

As you can see, direct Higgs production (red curve in plot above) is about ten times more frequent than associated production (blue and green curves for WH and ZH, respectively), but it is hard to exploit unless the Higgs has a mass of at least 140 GeV: below that value, its decay to b-quark pairs will make it utterly indistinguishable from “QCD background”, the continuum production of b-quark pairs by strong force. Conversely, associated production is less frequent, but it fills the gap at low mass with several possible signatures which retain discovery potential. 

For masses of the Higgs close to and above 160 GeV, the possibility of materializing into a pair of W bosons makes the search of direct production appealing, and it is indeed in that ballpark that the Tevatron will most likely be soon starting to set real limits on the existence of H. In order to do that, CDF and D0 will have to use all possible search methodologies, and combine their results.

Today’s news are that D0 has shown how to search for  decays by allowing one of the W bosons to decay into a tau lepton and tau neutrino, a difficult signature. The final state they sought includes a muon from one W, a tau from the other, and missing transverse energy caused by the energetic neutrinos produced in the W decays. The recent analysis proves to be not far from the sensitivity of the more “gold-plated” modes involving only electrons and muons. What’s more, the tau lepton is explicitly identified through its decay to a hadronic jet, so that the event candidates make a set completely orthogonal to those considered for the gold-plated modes.

Tau leptons are indeed fascinating, difficult animals from an experimental point of view. At 1.777 GeV, the mass of these “fat leptons” is large enough to allow a fast decay to either hadrons or lighter leptons via the weak force. If you take the pains to visit the Particle Data Group web site (no pains at all, it is a great site!), you will discover that taus have a very complex set of possible decay modes. There are a total of 203 possible final states which have been either measured or constrained by past studies! The most important of them from an experimental standpoint are cataloged depending on the type and number of charged particles produced:

• fully leptonic modes: or  - these make up for 17% of the total each;
• “one prong” modes: - for a total of 50%;
• “three prong” modes: (where h is a charged hadron) -for another 15%.

Of course, D0 did not look for the 203 final states individually, but they did separate the tau candidates into three main categories: narrow jets with a single charged track and no signal of additional electromagnetic deposits (which are usually due to neutral pions), narrow jets with a single track and additional deposits, and narrow jets with two or three charged tracks (with total mass below the tau lepton one!). Then, they taught a neural network classifier how to distinguish real tau jets from ordinary jets due to quark hadronization, the large background that hadronically-decaying taus have to fight against. They found out that the third category - jets with two or three tracks - is tougher to distinguish, and they left it unused in the present analysis. Tau candidates belonging to the first and second category were instead analyzed with the network, and the outputs were used together with additional information from the narrow jet to construct two different ”tau likelihoods”.

Incidentally, it is amazing to see the giant steps forward we have done in particle physics with advanced analysis methods these days. When I was a student, neural networks were frowned upon as means of signal discrimination, and likelihood techniques were considered very suspicious too. The thought of combining the output of a NN with other information into a global likelihood in a discovery search would have been considered delirious 15 years ago! These methods are now commonplace, and results obtained with them are routinely approved by the collaborations…

Anyway, back to the neat D0 analysis: the tau likelihoods were only a part of the discrimination process. In fact, decays need to be distinguished from generic pairs and several other backgrounds, including W + jets QCD production events. The many kinematic observables of the event -angle between leptons, missing transverse energy, lepton momenta- were used to cook up another global event likelihood, so that the final selection was done by selecting a slice of the plane of tau and kinematic likelihoods.

The plot above shows the distribution of simulated background and signal events in the plane for the second tau-candidate category, with a dashed line dividing the signal-enriched region from the discarded region. The green and red rectangles describe the relative frequency of the main backgrounds in the plane, while the hatched black rectangles show the signal distribution.

At the end of the game it always all boils down to a counting experiment: the D0 analysis is no exception. The number of remaining events in the data after cutting on the likelihood plane was compared with background expectations to derive a limit on Higgs production as a function of the unknown value of the Higgs boson mass (which impacts the result through a variation of the selection acceptance).

The final result can be seen in the plot above, which shows in picobarns the observed cross section limit (red curve) as a function of Higgs boson mass.  The blue curve shows the limit D0 expected to be observing with 1/fb worth of data, and the grey band show 1-sigma variations in the blue curve. The fact that the red curve is within the grey band does not mean much, but it confirms that what D0 sees is no surprise.

It will be very interesting to see the many new results on Higgs search by CDF and D0 combined in a single exclusion plot this summer. In the region around 160 GeV, I believe the Tevatron should be able to set limits at no more than twice the SM expectation… 

To find out more about this nice new analysis, please visit the D0 site of the analysis or read the  preprint paper.

Today I was back in my office and found a way to have a laugh with Devis, a colleague who recently spent a few days in the US.

Devis had been harassed before the trip by another colleague, Andrea, who wanted to save a hundred bucks on a multi-function pocket calculator. This is commonplace for italians traveling to the States: there always is a relative or a friend who knows electronics are cheaper overseas, and who will force you to spend endless afternoons in shopping malls in search for the requested item - and at times, to conceal said item while passing customs in order to save import taxes. And with the very advantageous exchange rate of dollars per euro these days, these sorts of requests have only gotten worse.

Devis had agreed to look for the pocket calculator (some fancy Hewlett-Packard model, apparently quite expensive), but once in the Chicago area, he had been unable to find it. So he stopped at a Wal-Mart, and had a brilliant, brilliant idea. Here is what he brought back:

At 10″ by 6″, the thing is mastodontic - indeed, it can be attached to a wall (there is even a suitable hook on the back). We laughed when we guessed the face Andrea will put up when presented with the “pocket” calculator. But then we had an idea for an even more fun joke.

The calculator has a silvery finish, and if one walks by keeping it sideways as a book, with its back showing, everybody will think it is a fancy, extra-slim laptop computer. So we already decided that at the next seminar or conference I have the occasion to follow, I will arrive late bringing the calculator with me, and walk confidently to the front row making sure everybody notices me. I will then sit down, carefully place the calculator in front of me, and meaningfully start poking on the giant rubbery keys, one finger per hand, with a concentrated look.

I bet you want to do it yourself. You have my permission. Get yours here, but don’t forget to report on the laughs.

Thanks Marcoscan for pointing out the site of Galaxy Zoo, where images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey can be analyzed in order to classify the galaxies into broad categories, for statistical analysis.

The human eye is better than pattern recognition software in classifying faint galaxies. That is, if one is suitably trained to do that. The site walks you through a tutorial session and then a self-evaluation session, where you learn whether you can participate in the project. The admission criteria are quite loose - I think it is hard to fail if you concentrate on the images.

Then the fun starts: you are presented with as many galaxy images as you like, one by one, and you are asked to decide what category each belongs to. The fascinating part for me is that most of the images you are presented with have not been seen by anybody before: you may be the first to look closely at any one galaxy from up close!

So far, I have classified a few hundred galaxies, and I find the game quite relaxing. Furthermore, every once in a while one is presented with pure beauty. It happened to me with the pair shown below, which I dubbed “Evil eyes”. You can find a lot of information on the pair here.

The site is complete with a forum, where users post their most beautiful finds, and discuss about the project. Definitely worth a visit!

Daniele Bortoluzzi (daniele.bortoluzzi@ing.unitn.it) is researcher in Mechanism and Machine Theory at the Department of Mechanical and Structural Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Trento (Italy). Since 2001 he is part of the Principal Investigator team of the LISA Pathfinder mission at the University of Trento and in this framework he is now involved in the development of the Caging Mechanism Assembly (responsibility of Thales Alenia Space) with the responsibility to verify its compliance to a mission critical phase.   

LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is a joint space mission of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for the in-flight detection of gravitational waves. LISA consists in a formation of three spacecrafts orbiting around the sun and makes it possible to reveal such time-dependent distortion of the space-time by carefully monitoring the relative displacement between pairs of free-floating test masses hosted on board of different spacecrafts. Just to give you an idea, each mass will be five million kilometers far from the other and the requested measurement accuracy on the displacement is of the order of the picometer! 

LISA is classified as a “cornerstone” mission thanks to its outstanding scientific relevance. It would provide an instrument that may measure the fluctuations of the gravity, that is the fundamental force that rules the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang. For instance, this means the possibility to detect black holes, super-massive black hole mergers and spiral descent of stars into black holes. Moreover, it will make it possible to “listen” the gravitational echo of the Big Bang. Details of the mission may be found in the ESA (http://www.esa.int/science/lisa) and NASA websites (http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov/WHATIS/intro.html).  

Due to the technological criticalities of this mission, prior to LISA a risk-reduction mission has been scheduled by ESA, called LISA Pathfinder (formerly SMART-2). This mission aims at providing experimental evidence that it is possible, in orbit, to set a reference mass in a status that results free from any disturbing force different from the gravity produced by the celestial bodies.If we think of any solid body in our familiar Earth environment, for instance a pen on our desk, we may be induced to assume that, except for the weight force (due to the Earth gravity field), no other forces are applied on it. This is wrong. The surrounding air carries acoustic waves that exert a fluctuating force on the external surface of the pen. Some electric charges sit on the dielectric parts of the pen and interact with stray electric fields that are present anywhere, and some metallic parts may hide a permanent magnetization that also would interact with magnetic fields. The desk is moved by the natural micro-seismic activity of the ground and transmits motion to the pen through the contacting surfaces. The result is that an inertial observer would see the pen not only orbiting around the sun together with the Earth, but also rattling a little bit across such an ideal trajectory. Even if this deviation may seem irrelevant, a gravity wave would produce a motion of the “pen-probe” far smaller. This means that the proof body that is devoted to sense the gravity wave must be accurately shielded from any non-gravitational force, and the goal of the LISA Pathfinder mission is to demonstrate that this is feasible to a level of disturbance that results negligible as compared with the expected action of the gravity wave. 

Let us now think of the LISA (or equivalently the LISA Pathfinder) mission, from the launch phase to the final in-orbit condition. A 2kg cubic Gold-Platinum test mass is hosted in a Gravitational Reference Sensor, inside a housing with millimetre - order surrounding gaps, that can not be reduced as any facing surface constitutes a potential source of disturbing force. Clearly, during the launch phase it cannot be left free to shake, otherwise it would damage the enclosing housing. A mechanism is being developed to firmly cage it against the launch vibration, by means of a holding preload in the range of hundreds of kilograms. In orbit, the test mass must be injected in free-floating conditions (no contact with the housing nor with any other thing) in an orbit that is not much different from that of the spacecraft, otherwise sooner or later it would touch the housing. This means that the contact with any caging device must be removed without inducing additional velocity to the test mass.

This might look like a trivial task, if we think that every day we grab and lay down objects that remain still, like the pen on the desk. However, in the Earth environment many effects are present that help us to break the unavoidable adhesive forces that arise at the contact between the object and our fingers. For instance, the weight of the pen and the friction force between the desk surface and the pen itself keep it still on the desk while we retract our fingers. This task becomes more difficult when we handle a strip of bi-adhesive tape and we want to throw it away from our fingers. The only solution is to stick it to another surface, because its weight is not enough to break the adhesive force with our fingers.

In the space environment, we have no gravity force to help us detach the test mass from the holding mechanism, while the adhesion force is still present between the contacting surfaces. Even if at much lower level, this situation is similar to that of the bi-adhesive tape, though we have no other surface to attach the test mass to. The solution that is pursued is similar to what we do when we want to get rid of something that sticks to our fingers but we do not want to attach it to something else: we shake the fingers until the inertia force pulls it away. With the LISA test mass, this strategy consists in quickly retracting the locking device from the contact, breaking adhesion by means of the tendency of the mass to remain still.

We understand that by following this procedure we cannot avoid imposing a small velocity to the released test mass, given by the action of the adhesive force during the rupture of the surface bonds, and the resulting orbit would again differ from that of the spacecraft. However, I can reveal now that we are not completely free of authority on the test mass: by means of an electric field, we may apply a weak force on it (a millionth of a Newton), that can help us to bring it back to the required orbit, that is at the centre of the enclosing housing. Unfortunately, this force is not enough to break the adhesive bonds (results a thousandth of them) and can only help us to stop the test mass after it has been released as described above.

Being LISA Pathfinder a technology demonstration mission aimed at assessing the possibility of achieving in orbit the free falling condition of a test mass, its task is also to demonstrate that an injection phase in free falling condition may be performed as proposed. A test mass that remains attached to the caging device or to the inner surfaces of the housing is not suitable for the measurement of gravity waves, and would jeopardize the entire mission. For this reason, it has been studied how to verify on ground the possibility of detaching a test mass from a locking device without imposing an excessive velocity, in representative conditions of the in-orbit environment (that is, reducing all the effects that in the Earth environment helped us to leave the pen still on the desk). This task implies a novel approach to the study of the adhesion between surfaces, that is the characterization of what happens when an adhesive bond is dynamically broken.

At the Department of Mechanical and Structural Engineering of the University of Trento (click on the image to see the video clip ) we have developed a facility aimed at studying these phenomena and understanding if the mechanism designed to release the LISA test mass to free floating conditions is compliant with the strict requirement for the successful injection in the final orbit. The video shows a view of our laboratory and the vacuum chamber for the release experiment.

The concept of the experiment (see the layout above with surrounding pictures) is to focus on the contacting surfaces of the test mass and the holding finger and reproduce on ground what takes place in flight. A little part of the test mass and the finger comprising the contacting surfaces are set in free-falling like conditions by suspending them through two thin vertical wires, realizing two simple pendulums. Even though the gravity force is present, it is balanced by the suspending wires and the two bodies result weakly constrained to the ground in the horizontal plane, in a dynamical condition similar to the absence of gravity. The mock-up of the holding finger is actuated through a horizontal wire, which minimizes the external perturbation to the contacting pendulums. Once the holding finger mock-up is retracted, the dynamic effect of the rupture of the adhesive force is made observable by the following free oscillations of the test mass mock-up.

The second video clip (click on the image to play) shows the induced oscillations of the test mass mock-up (on the left) by the retraction of the finger mock-up (the small rectangle held by two wires on the right). Notice that the revealed adhesion force arose just by setting them into contact without any preload. The facility is being updated to introduce this additional feature and larger force impulses are expected. Some interesting aspects of the adhesion between gold-coated surfaces are studied though this experiment, made visible by the dynamic of the phenomena (for instance, conservative and dissipative forces play different roles on the resulting force impulse and may be intentionally emphasized or reduced).

Acknowledgements are due to the Experimental Gravitation Group headed by Prof. Stefano Vitale of the Department of Physics and to my colleagues at the Department of Mechanical and Structural Engineering: Dr. Matteo Benedetti, Prof. Mauro Da Lio, Prof. Mario De Cecco, Dr. Paolo Bosetti, Dr. Ilaria Cristofolini, Dr. Francesco Biral, Prof. Roberto Oboe, Dr. Enrico Bertolazzi, Francesco Tondini, Dr. Luca Baglivo (CISAS Padova), Marco Lapolla (Thales Alenia Space). The activity is financially supported by ESA, INFN, Thales Alenia Space.

Additional details on the experiment of release of the test mass may be found in the following publications:

• Bortoluzzi D., Benedetti M., De Cecco M., Baglivo L., “A momentum transfer measurement experiment between contacting bodies in the presence of adhesion under near-zero gravity conditions”, Experimental Analysis of Nano and Engineering Materials and Structures, Springer, 2007, proceedings of the 13th ICEM International Conference on Experimental Mechanics, Alexandroupolis, Greece
• Bortoluzzi D., Benedetti M., Da Lio M., Bosetti P., “Ground-based verification of mechanisms for in-orbit objects release”, Proceedings of 12th IFToMM World Congress, 2007 Besancon, France
• Bortoluzzi D., Baglivo L., Benedetti M., Biral F., Bosetti P., Cavalleri A., Cristofolini I., Da Lio M., De Cecco M., Dolesi R., Fontanari V., Lapolla M., Oboe R., Radaelli P., Weber J. W., Vitale S., “Test-mass release phase ground testing for the LISA pathfinder mission”, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, American Institute of Physics, vol. 873, New York, 2006, Proceedings of the 6th International LISA Symposium, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
• Bortoluzzi D., Benedetti M., Vitale S., “A momentum transfer measurement technique between contacting free falling bodies in the presence of adhesion”, Journal of applied mechanics, American society of mechanical engineers, 2007, in press.

Previous guest posts in this site include:

• Amedeo Balbi,  ”Dark Energy for Beginners”

• Fabio Zandanel, “Dark Matter and the MAGIC Telescope”

The Bc meson is a particle composed of a b-quark and a anti-charm quark (charge conjugation applied to the state brings about the antiparticle, made by a anti-b-quark and a charm quark). It is just another meson - a bound state of two quarks - and it would not be so interesting to study, if the mass of the constituents weren’t so large. Indeed, the Bc meson is the first particle containing both b- and c- quarks, and so it does have some entertainment value for particle physicists.

In fact, there are several questions that may receive an answer by studying this particle. Is the decay rate consistent with what one would expect from the current model of these objects ? Is the mass compatible with what one would compute by modeling the state as a almost non-relativistic system composed of a charm quark jiggling around the heavier b-quark ? How about lattice QCD computations for the mass of such a unconventional meson ? Moreover, is the pattern of possible decays following what we predict ? Also, is the overall production rate in agreement with what QCD predicts (this latter question is probably the hardest to answer presently…) ?

The Bc was discovered by CDF in 1998, but its decay to a J/psi meson and a single pion had not been seen before. CDF has now performed a very simple search for this final state, by tuning the search criteria on the twin particle B-, which is much more frequently produced in proton-antiproton collisions. The B- is composed of a b-quark and a anti-u quark, and it may decay to a J/psi meson and a Kaon. The kinematics of that decay should be quite similar to the one searched for the Bc, so CDF could decide what cuts to apply to particle momenta and other observables beforehand, basing the selection on the well known B- signal, and then collect data silently, until the “signal box” was full enough to beg to be opened. By doing things this way, the search has been quite model-independent, and the results much more easy to interpret.

We now have a 8-sigma signal of Bc –> J/psi pi decays. You can see the reconstructed invariant mass of the system in the following plot:

As you see, the large dataset of 2.2 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions allows for a significant signal to emerge on the exponentially falling background, even if this particle is not very frequently produced -indeed, there are large uncertainties in the theoretical predictions for its production rate - and even if the decay to J/psi and pion is not the most frequent one (I need to check this though… I will update later with some number). The mass of the meson is measured to be 6274.1 +- 3.2 +- 2.6 MeV, which is smaller but not inconsistent with current estimates from lattice QCD (6304 MeV), which carries some 18-mevish systematics. The ball is now in the lattice QCD field to get a better match with experimental measurements.. In the meantime, CDF will collect more of these interesting events, and improve our understanding of this intriguing particle.

More detail on the recent measurement described above can be found this preprint paper.

Dennis Overbye wrote today for the New York Times an accurate piece on the searches going on at the Tevatron for Higgs bosons, and the atmosphere in the laboratory where the two experiments, CDF and D0, are performing the analysis of the data. I was quoted several times in the article, and the link to this site contained in the NYT page is causing a lot of extra traffic here.

I imagine many of the less search-inclined readers will find a link to my original post on the Higgs rumor of last month useful… On the other hand, I think the post in itself is not too useful. I humbly apologize and offer readers the chance to give a look at the page “Higgs search” on the tab above. Or see this summary of the affair.

I was lazily playing with Google Earth this morning, when I discovered something weird. If you go to the Frankfurt airport vicinities, at coordinates 50°03′04″N, 8°36′43″ E, you will see a Lufthansa A340 airbus taking off eastward, as in the picture below.

As you can see, there are three separate images of the plane, separated by about 630 meters. That means that the pictures composing the frame have been taken at 6 second intervals, if we assume a take-off speed of about 360 km/h (I haven’t checked, but it is the right order of magnitude). Now, the first riddle is about the shadows. If one looks closely, one understands that the pictures were taken at about noon, with the sun projecting shadows of buildings, cars, and road signs northward - at least, that is what happens to all objects in the picture (N is on the left in the picture above), save the plane! The A340 appears to project shadows westwards instead. How is it possible ?

Another riddle concerns the cars on the highway. It appears that there are only two images for them. For instance, look at the following four vehicles in the picture below: a red car, a white van, a short yellow truck, and a long white truck.

I have looked on all the highways nearby, and I could only find pairs of vehicles - but the planes are three. Maybe I did not look close enough ? What is your explanation ?

Nezareth Castillo Rey, aka Castirey, at 9 years of age is a successful evangelical preacher, who likes (or is instructed) to embark in nonsensical attacks to the theory of evolution. When I saw him on italian TV news today working his audience by walking up and down the stage as if possessed, making faces, moving his arms up and down, and screaming nonsense at the crowd in trance, I could not help seeing the ape in him - and in the adoring listeners just as much.

We share more than 98% of our genome with chimpanzees. And some of us, like that boy in suit and tie grown up too quickly, have mastered the social skills of those animals, too. It is the result of a slow and only partly successful evolutionary effort if a 9-year-old ex-chimp can now hold a mike and be heard by thousands in the auditorium, or millions on YouTube .

“Tracks are dilating, trains run slower“

(Original title on http://www.repubblica.it : “I binari si dilatano, treni piu’ lenti”).

Interesting concept. Of course the title means to say that given the high temperatures in Italy in this torrid July, tracks have become less safe for trains, which thus have to reduce their top speed. On the other hand, one could read the text to mean that trains take more time to reach destination because the total track length has increased! ;-) 

Hmmm, wait! The wheels of the trains have also increased in size (they are equally made of steel). And indeed, the track length may change but the path length stays the same, if tracks dilatate to fill the gap between a piece and the next one. So in fact one would expect trains to cover the distance in less time… Also note that the speed of the train is read by instruments that measure the rotational speed of the wheels, assuming they have a constant diameter….

I have better stop now, lest I get accused of being a crackpot myself. These are days of suspicion.

While discussing with me the ups and downs of a quick diffusion of information in the blogosphere, an esteemed theoretical physicist pointed me to a paper posted on the ArXiV just four days ago, as an example of the damage that scientists themselves may risk causing to their own field of research.

The paper is a startling read. I apologize to the authors for my bluntness, but I am used to speak my mind in my blog: I had not seen such a pile of unmitigated BS in the ArXiV since I don’t know when.

The paper (hep-ph/0707-1919), titled “Search for Future Influence from the LHC”, is written by two respectable physicists, and at least one of them is indeed quite famous. I am tempted to review it in detail, but let me rather choose the path of utter incorrectness for once, by quoting out of context, just to give you the flavor of the whole pile. Quoting out of context is a sublimely reproachable art: you can make a genius look like an idiot, and vice-versa. It’s called journalism, baby.

So here we go. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get bumpy.

“Abstract: (yes, it starts right there) We propose an experiment which consists of pulling a card and use it to decide restrictions of the running of LHC at CERN, such as luminosity, beam energy or total shut down”.

I have to compose myself, since tears are running down my cheeks.
…
Ok, let’s move on.

The paper starts with a sobering remark, which nobody can disagree with. It still gets shivers down my spine:

“Usually it is believed by causality that backward causation[1], in the sense of what happens at a later time influences what happens earlier, does not occur”.

That really sets the stage: the authors know what they are talking about: they are not aliens, they pat our shoulder and say, pal, we’re on the same league here.

“When the Higgs particle shall be produced, we shall retest if there could be influence from the future so that, for instance, the potential production of a large number of Higgs particles in a certain time development would cause a pre­-arrangement so that the large number of Higgs productions, should be avoided.”

Hmm… A momentary divergence ?

“Such prearrangements may be considered influence from the future”

No. The helm is firmly set towards nonsense.

The paper now starts discussing probabilities in the context of the path integral formalism, with an action which has an imaginary part (a crucial detail, apparently). A discussion of the impact of a imaginary part of the action on the evolution of the universe follows. Then things get even murkier:

“However, high energy physics machines with their relativistic particles would [...] may [sic] influence their past and for instance such influence could have meant that these machines would have been met with bad luck by prearrangement and got their funds cut so as not work”.

Here I am crying for the revolting grammar, but the point is that these guys are using a noun, “luck”, which, let’s put it mildly, does not belong in a scientific paper. But more tests are in store:

“Seemingly there were no such effects of bad luck for relativistic accelerators as ISR wherein the particles were even stored for long times”.

There follow a couple of sentences which I have no guts to copy here. Some fragments:

“To rescue our model [...] we could, however, make in our opinion the very mild speculation that fundamentally there exists magnetic monopoles [...] provide the argument for that even for the high energy experiments so far no effect of bad or good luck should have been observed”.

And then they turn to the Higgs.

“Thus it is really not unrealistic that precisely at the first a large number of of Higgs production also our model-expectations that is influence for the future would show up”.

That is too much. Such grammar would be enough for me to prevent publication even on a preprint server. But refraining from vomiting, let me quote the following sentence.

“Very interestingly in this connection is that the SSC in Texas accidentally would have been the first machine to produce Higgs on a large scale. However it were actually stopped after a quarter of the tunnel were built, almost a remarkable [underlined in the original] piece of bad luck.”

Aha! Now I get it. Let me guess. Probably the future influenced the minds of US congressmen into voting off the SSC funding, so that fewer Higgses would be produced. The universe is saved! D3B0, open the worm hole, we’re going home!

Do you need to stop reading and get a glass of whiskey ? Please do, it’s not over yet. Pour it down and stay with me till the bitter end. We’re now going into the section called “Proposal of the experiment“. They need to lay down some preliminary observation first.

“It seems most likely that production of Higgs particles should lead to smaller P(s) than no Higgs production since otherwise there would presumably already have been produced lots of Higgs particles in nature somehow.”

Gulp. John, please give me another glass. No ice.

“With this model we expect, that a Higgs producing machine will be stopped by some accident or another if the effect is sufficiently large…”

Oh god.

“The experiment proposed in the present article is to give the ‘foresight’, so to speak, a chance of avoiding having to close LHC by some funding or other bad luck accident, as it happened to SSC, by instead playing a game of pulling a card from a well mixed stack about the running of the LHC”.

John, you can leave the bottle here. Gosh. No kidding. These guys are proposing to save the LHC physics program by pulling a card out of a deck. But it gets even more delirious, if you still haven’t reached the bottom of your scale yet.

“On most of the cards there should be just written ‘use LHC freely’, so that they cause no restrictions.”

Whew, I feel relieved.

“But on a very small fraction of the cards there should be restrictions for luminosity or beam energies or some combination. On one card one may eve have ‘close LHC’.”

I could comment that I did play similar games in my middle school time and again, but I never reverted causality, maybe because I never got the hot card - kissing the ugly ones was the most exciting thing that used to happen.

Enough already ? Not really. Read this:

“The numbers r,a and p should of course be very small, whereas the excess average damage, presumably is of order unity. One could, however, estimate that this damage extra presumably involves even human lives so that several people may be killed during some explosion stopping LHC.”

Wait. You’re right. Enough said.

It’s very sad to see some valuable minds writing such a pile of unmitigated bullshit (I allow myself the word this down the post). It makes one wonder if their reputation is an accident. So now who is the crackpot ? The honest amateur who tries to find a relationship between mass values, or the big shot with hundreds of published papers ?

Nobody is a crackpot. Ideas are good, bad, idiotic, demented. If there were a fifth category, the paper discussed above would belong to it.

Update (for the series, better late than never): I realized with a week of delay that Sabine at Backreaction had already discussed the paper… Oh well, that allowed me a fresh look at it rather than a pre-digested one  Not that I object to Bee’s paper digestion…