{"id":4789,"date":"2013-03-17T10:23:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T14:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=4789"},"modified":"2013-03-17T10:23:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T14:23:40","slug":"not-so-contrarian-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=4789","title":{"rendered":"Not so contrarian physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post a few days ago<\/a>, I expressed my skeptical views concerning the interpretation of some of the recent Higgs results from CERN. I used a simple analogy, an example in which measuring the average height of the inhabitants in a set of buildings is used to determine which of them may house the Harlem Globetrotters.<\/p>\n

However, I came to realize (thanks in part to some helpful criticism that my post received) that I left out one possibility. What if the buildings are too small? Or the ‘Trotters are just too, hmm, tired after a long party and end up in the wrong building? In that case, a measurement may look like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If we have an a priori<\/em> reason to believe that, for whatever reason, the players are indeed spread out across several buildings, then we can indeed not expect to see a sharp peak at #4 (or whichever building is assigned to the Globetrotters); instead, we should see a broad excess, just what the CMS experiment is seeing when it measured the decay of the presumed Higgs boson into a \u03c4+<\/sup>\u03c4\u2212<\/sup> pair.<\/p>\n

So is there an a priori<\/em> reason for the data to be spread out like this? I believe there is. No instrument detects\u00a0\u03c4 leptons directly, as their lifetime is too short. Instead,\u00a0\u03c4 events are reconstructed from decay products, and all forms of\u00a0\u03c4 decay involve at least one neutrino, which may carry away a significant portion of the lepton’s energy. So the final uncertainty in the total measured energy of the\u00a0\u03c4+<\/sup>\u03c4\u2212<\/sup> pair can be quite significant.<\/p>\n

In other words, many of the Globetrotters may indeed be sleeping in the wrong building.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, as my copy of the venerable 20-year old book, The Higgs Hunter’s Guide<\/em> suggests, the decay into\u00a0\u03c4 leptons can be a valuable means of confirmation. Which is perhaps why it is troubling that for now, the other major detector at the LHC, ATLAS, failed to see a similar broad excess of\u00a0\u03c4+<\/sup>\u03c4\u2212<\/sup> events near the presumed Higgs mass.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post a few days ago, I expressed my skeptical views concerning the interpretation of some of the recent Higgs results from CERN. I used a simple analogy, an example in which measuring the average height of the inhabitants in a set of buildings is used to determine which of them may house the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4789"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4796,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789\/revisions\/4796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}