Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

https://www.quantamagazine.org/growing-anomalies-at-the-large-hadron-collider-hint-at-new-particles-20200526/

by theafh • 6 years ago

140 88 6 years ago

It’s 4.7/fb of data, meaning data taken up to 2016, but with some gaps it seems. I think the total pp luminosity for the two big ones is around 15/fb, wonder why LHCb has so little in this analysis?

Bummer that the significance is only about 0.3 bigger than the last analysis, but at least it’s not a 750 peak yet.

Roritharr• 6 years ago

What's an fb?

lippel82• 6 years ago

A femtobarn, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)

cjfd• 6 years ago

femtobarn

SiempreViernes3• 6 years ago

Strictly speaking, those are inverse femtobarns, the nonsensical unit for accumulated number of collisions that particle physicists use.

semi-extrinsic3• 6 years ago

OK, attempt at ELI5:

The people are crashing lots of bunches of pebbles into each other, in two streams that meet.

Some of the people are interested in observing what happens when the small blue pebble hits a big gray pebble and the big one cracks. They know the "probability" (cross-section) of this process is around 100 fb.

Other people care about what happens when little tiny green pebbles collide three at a time. They know the "probability" of this is 11 fb - not so likely since three things need to line up.

The people operating the streams of pebbles keep track of how many inverse fb they produce. Let's say in 2019 they produced 0.7 inverse fb.

Then the people who care about blue/gray collisions know they can expect to find around 70 events in all the data from 2019, while the green/green/green people know they can expect about 7-8 events.

When the people who collide streams of pebbles are going to build yet another Even Bigger Pebble Crashing Machine, they estimate in advance what the "luminosity" will be - how many inverse fb they will produce per year. Then the people looking for events know, "aha, with the new great crasher I can science even more!"

davrosthedalek• 6 years ago

A femtobarn. Unitwise, it's an area, a measure of the probability of an interaction, the "literal" cross section of the things you try to hit.

Luminosity, often measured in inverse (femto) barn, is the other side: The number of tries, given by the number of particles you collided.

The product of these is the number of events of this type which occur on average.

So if you measured for 10 inverse femtobarn integrated luminosity, a process which has a cross section of 1 femtobarn should have happened 10 times.

SomeoneFromCA• 6 years ago

Facebook, duh.

pas• 6 years ago

I found this detailed explanation: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/12071/246093

magicalhippo2• 6 years ago

The LHCb detector is different in that it is designed to measure decay products that fly along the beam pipe, rather than those that fly off in all directions like ATLAS and CMB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHCb_experiment#The_LHCb_detec...

https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Detector/Detector-en.html

SiempreViernes3• 6 years ago

That’s right, it’s mostly forward! So they’re just much less efficient at generating data from the events compared to the big detectors?

Still, what’s up with the lack of data from 2013-2015, was it shutdown during all that time?

mcv4• 6 years ago

"Growing anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider" sounds like a premise for a Hollywood horror movie about a strange, shimmering anomaly growing at a science lab.

bshimmin• 6 years ago

I would so watch this. Perhaps it could involve the infamous baguette [1] mutating into something horrifying.

[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-11/bread-loving-...

kelnage• 6 years ago

Alternatively, see "The Three Body Problem" by Cixin Liu [1] for an interesting take on what such anomalies could indicate!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

xenophonf• 6 years ago

Ugh. That book was _terrible_. Maybe something got lost in translation since it's so highly acclaimed, but I just couldn't get past the opening chapters.

dekhn2• 6 years ago

I found this to be one of the least enjoyable science fiction books I've ever read.

hrkucuk• 6 years ago

Sounds a like a typical Black Mesa incident...

willis936• 6 years ago

Prepare for unforeseen consequences.

pugworthy• 6 years ago

Uh...it's probably not a problem...probably...but I'm showing a small discrepancy in...well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence.

craftinator• 6 years ago

Have you read The Fold by Peter Clines? This headline sounds like it would come from that universe!

hinkley3• 6 years ago

There's a great quote on this that's escaping me now, but essentially reproducing other people's experimental results is great for them not so much for you, or just proves that you are competent at running experiments.

Being able to run experiments properly is foundational for new science, but it isn't new science. Unexpected results that cannot be explained by human error (ie, bad experiments) is the origin story for new science.

So when weird results happen without any reasonable, rational explanation, everybody starts to salivate. "Growing anomalies" I expect is a bit like when the aromas start coming out of the kitchen before a big dinner is served.

imvetri• 6 years ago

super cool

foobarbecue• 6 years ago

Probably just weasels. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494...

hinkley3• 6 years ago

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." - Matt Groening

lebuffon• 6 years ago

I have found it dis-heartening that higher energy levels at the LHC have not opened new doors into reality. This simulation in which we find ourselves seems designed to obfuscate. :)

This small aberration may give some clues... maybe... some day

logicchains• 6 years ago

I have found it dis-heartening that higher energy levels at the LHC have not opened new doors into reality.

I think the last thing we need is LHC opening new doors into reality. The only thing that could be more dangerous than such research into teleportation is research into teleportation that's conducted on Mars.

Trasmatta• 6 years ago

But just think of all the great things we could do with that Argent Energy.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

Don't forget the LHC April Fool's joke where the remote cameras show a black hole eating CERN.

There's also a great documentary about interdimensional portals, called Hell Boy, that everyone should watch.

btrettel5• 6 years ago

Not about the article per se:

Why do particle/high-energy and quantum physics get so much media attention compared against other branches of physics?

HEP and quantum physics are fairly uninteresting to me but I'm wondering about others.

nxpnsv2• 6 years ago

Because probing the fundamental building blocks of the universe is very interesting to some people. So now your question is: why do people care what we're made of? Not sure about that one although i spend over a decade in HEP... on the other hand, if they don't then what do they care about? It is easier to do physics than to understand people...

btrettel5• 6 years ago

I suppose I disagree about what is "fundamental".

On some level I can see how HEP and quantum mechanics are "fundamental" in that they describe the "building blocks" of the universe.

But these branches of physics really only describe matter at very small scales. In terms of being actually useful to understand the vast majority of physical situations encounted in practice, HEP and quantum physics are mostly useless. "Classical" physics is more "fundamental" in the sense that it is more useful in a wider variety of contexts.

Or at least this is my view, as a fluid dynamicist. Turbulence is far more important than HEP, but unfortunately it receives far less media attention and far less attention from the brightest people. (I think turbulence has HEP beat in funding, though. :-)

auntienomen• 6 years ago

The story of quantum and particle physics is more accessible to most people because of its interplay with modern (i.e., post World War I) popular culture. People may not know the technical details, but they've heard of the players (Einstein, von Neumann,...) and they've seen the impact on the world (Manhattan project, World Wide Web). This gives them some basis for relating to news about particle physics. Maybe if we lived in a different world (underwater?), everyone might have heard of Kolmogorov instead. Then we'd be treated to lots of arm-chair speculation about whether Navier-Stokes solutions exist...

Even if one doesn't find the physics intrinsically interesting, one can at least appreciate the engineering achievements.

btrettel5• 6 years ago

I'll agree with you that culture is a major factor and that in a plausible alternative history Kolmogorov and others who worked on fluids would be better known. However, I disagree on the point that people see the impacts of modern physics more readily:

Maybe if we lived in a different world (underwater?), everyone might have heard of Kolmogorov instead.

We are immersed in a fluid: air. One could argue that the 3 orders of magnitude difference in density could be a factor in popularity, but I'm not so sure.

one can at least appreciate the engineering achievements

I don't think that (e.g.) aerospace engineering had worse achievements or marketing than nuclear weapons. Around and after WWII both made huge and impressive advances. One could argue that aerospace engineering was more visible as well, with flying being a common mode of transportation and the exploration of space being of popular interest. For some reason that doesn't seem to make fluid dynamics as interesting to most folks as modern physics. (Though I certainly would claim that the space race in particular improved the standing of fluid dynamics.)

Octoth0rpe• 6 years ago

Because there is still a persistent and almost certainly naive hope that HEP will eventually give us warp drives and accessible interstellar colonization. You know, the things sci-fi is made of.

Turbulence is just about as likely to offer up such secrets, but that's less obvious :)

Super_Jambo• 6 years ago

CERN has a bigger marketing budget than lots of little labs doing smaller scale stuff.

danbruc• 6 years ago

I my case - and I could well imagine this to be true for many - it is not really about physics at all. It is more about the philosophical aspect, wanting to know how the universe works at a fundamental level, what exists, what is space, what is time, what does this mean for free will and consciousness. In everyday life relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics are as useless as being able to calculate stresses in a beam or understanding turbulence or knowing about metamaterials. From time to time I may actually need some classical mechanics or electrodynamics to understand how something works or to solve a specific problem, but unless it is part of your hobby or job non-fundamental physics beyond some basic knowledge is just as irrelevant as fundamental physics in most peoples life. Fundamental physics and cosmology on the other hand fills in a certain sense the same spot that religion does for other people.

btrettel5• 6 years ago

Thanks for your comment. I don't seem to appreciate the philosophical aspects as much as others.

dorkwood• 6 years ago

You might be coming at it from a purely technical angle, rather than thinking about the story. "Humans build giant machine to uncover the secrets of the universe" is an interesting story with mass appeal. The physics are irrelevant.

empath75• 6 years ago

They're focusing on answering questions that has been wondered about since the beginning of human civilization, and the earliest philosophers. "What are the fundamental building blocks of the universe? Why is there something rather than nothing?" Questions like that are more universally interesting than 'how can we build a room temperature super conductor'

jpeg_hero• 6 years ago

I heard an interesting theory, I wish I could credit whoever thought it up but I've forgotten. The theory is that the success Dirac had and all of the successes of the other luminaries around the early 1900 - 1930's (essentially everyone in the picture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...) has created the perception that HEP and quantum physics are this dynamic field where the mysteries of the universe are being rapidly discovered. According to this theory, this romantic vision has led kids to get into the field even when real discoveries have actually ground to a halt and what is achievable has shrunk and shrunk. Basically, this area of science is played out or is in a natural ebb causing everyone in the field to have an existential crisis. Interesting theory.

btrettel5• 6 years ago

Something like that would make a lot of sense to me. Today, I think quantum physics isn't such a bad field for scientists to work in, but only because of quantum computing. On the other hand, I can't see any compelling reason to work on HEP.

siscia• 6 years ago

Since we are talking about CERN let me take this opportunity to invite, whoever is interested, to visit the laboratory.

Beside the stop imposed by COVID, CERN organize guided tour to the laboratory and when possible the detectors.

If you are around the area of Geneva or you happen to be around, I really suggest the visits.

The guides are usually people working at CERN so they are quite knowable about it.

It is necessary to book the visit in advance.

sabas_ge• 6 years ago

A lot in advance :) I booked more than a month before because there are 10/20 places available per day.. I visited by myself the Globe (where Tim Berners Lee machine is located) and the microcosm exhibitions by myself, and the guided tour covered and introduction, the LHC control room and the first accelerator (synchrocyclotron)

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Thanks. I got to visit as a student, in 2008/2009 I believe, and it was a great time. Seeing ATLAS and many other experiments.

_Anken• 6 years ago

Second! Visiting is very interesting, and the tour guides are real scientists that actually work there. I was lucky that they were able to fit me in same-day even though I hadn't booked ahead as strongly recommended.

scottwuzhear• 6 years ago

Looks like they got hugged to death: https://visit.cern/tours

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sanxiyn• 6 years ago

The previous similar happening is documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/750_GeV_diphoton_excess.

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

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