An insolent ranting of Dr. Dorigo on account of fascinating paper on future influence at the LHC by Nielsen and Ninomiya lead me to re-call some of the papers by Nielsen. Particularly this one :

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?eprint=hep-ph/9511371

Paper is done in 1995. CDF&D0 just measured top mass quark the time to be 180 +- 12 GeV. The paper predicts mass of top to be 173 +- 5 GeV and mass of Higgs to be 135 +- 9 GeV

The paper DOES not use experimental quark mass value as an input, it relies on alpha_s and M_plank and works from the first principles.

I understand that currently the mass of the top is: 174.2 ± 3.3 GeV, so the prediction by
Neilsen and Froggatt made in 1995 is remarkably precise. So, would Higgs mass be as precise as
the top mass they predict? Another predictions by them - no new physics up to Plank scale, and in particular no super-symmetry. This paints a bleak picture for Tevatron as this is the range of masses
where it is the least sensitive (accroding to the plot by Tevatron Higgs sensitivity Group Study) .
Nor the pictutre is bright for the LHC as there will be no new physics found except the expected Higgs at the predicted mass.

I would love if a theorist may please comment on this paper, as I, obviously, do not qualify to judge it.

Thanks,
f15mos

Not sure what the problem is. Would you like to hear garbage results? No shortage of those when the checking procedures are lax. Just a few years ago not just one, but _about eight_ different collaborations announced that they had discovered pentaquarks — bound states of 5 quarks. Almost certainly all complete garbage — other collaborations checked more carefully and they don’t appear to exist. Now a several scientists look like fools (sometimes justified, sometimes not). It is very easy, even for experienced people, to get fooled by the data — and by career pressures. And then the wool gets pulled over the eyes of the public.

And you may be surprised to hear that the “boundary” between “official” results and pure leaks and rumors can often get incredibly fuzzy. Remember that you have, in several collaborations, 500+ collaborators giving talks _all the time_ at universities, labs, and conferences all over the world. Sometimes a fraction of these talks are vetted beforehand by a speakers’ bureau, but that’s usually only about 1/3 of the talks, on average. The ~2/3 majority are people that have been individually invited. You obviously can’t control what people say. It is purely through the good will (sometimes absent!) of collaborators that garbage “Nobel-prize winning discoveries” from collaboration X are not constantly presented to audiences, in the name of people wanting faculty positions, etc. And _often_ that good will is absent. This is why good modern collaborations try to be careful about making a distinction between approved and unapproved results, and being careful about what is approved and banning collaborators from releasing unapproved results.

Yes, things _are_ somewhat messy in supersymmetry, but one needs to remember that there are a lot of questions that need to be answered and a _whole lot of data_ that it needs to fit.

Questions that it needs to addressed _in some degree_: 1) unification of the strong force with the electroweak force, 2) the dark matter problem, 3) why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter (BAU — baryon asymmetry of the universe), 4) why the Higgs mass doesn’t tend toward enormous values (the Planck scale) in contradiction with its needing to be below ~1 TeV to account for observed electroweak unification. It is interesting that something that doesn’t at first sight have anything to do with these problems — a symmetry between integer spin particles and half-integer spin particles, can _both_ help address these problems _and_ be consistent with the data.

However, supersymmetry does introduce a very large number of free parameters (the masses of all the supersymmetric particles, how they mix with each other, etc.). Many of these free parameters are already fairly tightly constrained by present data, but no supersymmetric particles have, to this date, been observed. We will see, at the Tevatron and the LHC (probably primarily the latter) whether it exists or not.

I can understand that members of a collaboration are annoyed by the leaking (more like dribbling) of incompletely analyzed results. It both steals their thunder and creates a pressure. Expressions of concern about the effects of such leaks on future support for HEP may be more of a rationalization of that annoyance than the cause of the annoyance.

After looking at your discussion of the messy proliferation of new fields etc., I don’t think anyone can honestly refer to the fundamental physical situation as being “simple” any more.

(Fun commenter fact: I’m #1, 2, 3 and 4 in Google search for “quantum measurement paradox”! Check it out, I may be on to something …

Link #1)

You could be right, as it’s not a well-defined thing I don’t think there’s any good way of knowing. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the risk of HEP’s reputation, and I would object to collaborators of mine releasing any sort of “hints” before an official and carefully checked release.

I don’t really think the analogy of Higgs rumors to SSC cost estimates holds much water. Bad cost estimates were undoubtedly part of the SSC story, but from what I remember they weren’t rumors but issued officially by the people responsible for doing so as part of the budget process.

Sure, if rumors keep coming out about a Tevatron Higgs that all turn out to be unfounded, people will stop paying attention to the rumors. I don’t think this at all affects the credibility of results officially released by the collaborations. People who are interested enough to follow this story know the difference between a rumor and a published result.

Standard model:
(4 fields) - (3 absorbed) = 1 Higgs field

N=2 supersymmetry:
(4 x 2 = 8 fields) - (3 absorbed) = 5 Higgs fields
There are also 5 Higgsino fields, but depending on the exact supersymmetric parameters, some can mix with other neutral spin-1/2 fields such as the Zino, photino, etc. to form so-called “neutralino” and “chargino” fields. Higgsinos (or neutralinos) will have very different decay signatures than a Higgs (due to the fact that supersymmetric particles have a different so-called “R-parity” than normal ones, and in most sensible supersymmetric models this R-parity value is conserved), thus it is extremely unlikely a Higgsino would be seen on a Higgs search.

Perhaps the most damaging example of this was not actually with a scientific result, but with a cost estimate. The cost estimate for the SSC was prematurely released to the public and was incomplete and far lower than the actual cost turned out to be. Then, as Congress kept getting steady and large increases in the project cost as the project got more well-defined, opposition slowly and steadily built. There are _many_ other turns to that story, but we all know how it ended. Premature and nebulous cost estimates did great damage to public and Congressional opinion of the SSC.

Analogously, if multiple nebulous “discoveries” of the Higgs are continually released and turn out to be garbage — needless to say, HEP will lose credibility (especially if the Higgs doesn’t even exist, who knows at this exact point in time, it certainly might not). That’s in absolutely nobody’s best interest. Determine a result, take the time and effort to get it right, and _only then_ publicly announce it, is the time-tested right way of doing things.

Well… I’m a bit confused about that. What the article says is:

The official silence did not stop speculation. If it is a Higgs, theorists say, it is probably not the one prescribed by the Standard Model, which would not be produced plentifully enough to be seen yet.

The leading alternative is that it would be one of five Higgs bosons predicted by a theory called supersymmetry, which theorists have been yearning for as the next step toward a more all-embracing, unified theory of nature.

So this seems to be saying that the normal standard model is incompatible with a Higgs Boson which is low-mass enough to make the rumored Tevatron bump real, but that supersymmetric theories would incidentally predict a variation on the Higgs which could have made that bump. That sounds reasonable enough.

But: “One of five”? Why does supersymmetry result in five Higgs Bosons? And is this a necessary side-effect of supersymmetry, or just something that some but not all supersymmetric theories include? Looking at the wikipedia entry on the MSSM, it seems to claim there are only two variants on the Higgs in the MSSM– the Higgs and the Higgsino.

Is the idea that the NYT meant to say that the rumored bump couldn’t have been the Higgs, but it could have been the Higgsino, and the “five” was just an error?

Is it necessarily known that the Higgsino must be lighter than the Higgs?

The bottom line is that, on the whole, a variety of people (including Lykken’s string theorists who don’t even know how to spell “Higgs”) are a lot more interested in and excited by what the Tevatron experimentalists are doing than they were before all this started, while well aware that no solid claims have yet been made by the experimental groups. Again, where’s the problem?

The real irony will be when the initial LHC Higgs results, whatever the are, get leaked through an internet blog. Then CERN will be sorry about inventing this whole Web thing.