STEM beyond Steroids (And America's Role in The Future of Scientific Discovery)

Chasing the Higgs Boson

At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle.

Peter Higgs, center, of the University of Edinburgh, was one of the first to propose the particle’s existence. From left, physicists at CERN who helped lead the hunt for it: Sau Lan Wu, Joe Incandela, Guido Tonelli and 

MEYRIN, Switzerland — Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.”

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature’s clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist — to know something that nobody else has ever known — was happening to someone else.

He flew back to Geneva the next day. “My wife was stunned,” he recalled.

He would not see them again for months.

Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had every reason to believe that they were closing in on the Great White Whale of modern science: the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain all the others then known and how they fit together into the jigsaw puzzle of reality.

For almost half a century, physicists had chased its quantum ghost through labyrinths of mathematics and logic, and through tons of electronics at powerful particle colliders, all to no avail.

Now it had come down to the Large Hadron Collider, where two armies of physicists, each 3,000 strong, struggled against each other and against nature, in a friendly but deadly serious competition.

In physics tradition, they were there to check and complement each other in a $10 billion experiment too valuable to trust to only one group, no matter how brilliant and highly motivated.

The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe. (The other theorists were François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl R. Hagen of the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University.)

Elementary particles — the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our DNA and our iPhones — would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line.

Rex Features, via Associated Press

ATOMIC IMPACT CERN's Large Hadron Collider tears protons apart by putting them on a collision course at nearly the speed of light. Physicists monitoring the mammoth collider hoped to catch a fleeting glimpse of hidden Higgs in the subatomic rubble.

Without this mystery field, everything in the universe would be pretty much the same, a bland fizz of particles running around at the speed of light. With it, there could be atoms and stars, and us.

Leon Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois, where the boson was being sought, once called it “the God particle,” scandalizing his colleagues but delighting journalists, who kept using the name. Dr. Lederman later said that he wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”

The “Easter Bump Hunt” of April 2011, as it came to be called, was only one episode in a roller coaster of sleepless nights, bright promises, missed clues, false alarms, euphoria, depression, gritty calculation, cooperation and envy, all the tedium and vertiginous notions of modern science.

On the way to fulfill what they thought was their generation’s rendezvous with scientific destiny, the physicists dangled from harnesses in hard hats to construct detectors bigger than apartment buildings in underground caverns. They strung wires and cranked bolts to coax thousand-ton magnets to less than a thousandth of an inch of where they needed to be. They wrote millions of lines of code to calibrate and run devices that would make NASA engineers stand by the track with their hats in their hands in admiration.

In their down time, they proposed marriage and made rap videos in the tunnels where subatomic particles collided. They ate, slept and partied, threw snowballs and worried that an unguarded smile in the cafeteria or a glance at a friend’s laptop could bias a half-billion-dollar experiment or give away cosmic secrets.

Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way in an e-mail, “The experiments are very large collaborations and they have the good, the bad, the crooks, the Sopranos, the opportunists — a prototype of the world as we know it.”

Particle Physicists in U.S. Worry About Being Left Behind

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: March 4, 2013

Are the glory days of American physics over?

On a Sunday morning early in January, about two dozen prominent physicists gathered behind closed doors at the California Institute of Technology to ponder the state of their craft.

American physicists were not exactly sitting on the sidelines last July whenCERN announced the probable discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, the key to understanding the origin of mass and life in the universe.

The United States contributed $531 million to building and equipping the Large Hadron Collider, the multibillion-dollar European machine with which the discovery was made. About 1,200 Americans work at CERN, including Joe Incandela from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led one of the two teams making the July announcement.

But as science goes forward, American particle physicists are wondering what role, if any, they will play in the future in high-energy physics — the search for the fundamental particles and forces of nature — a field they once dominated.

“There is enormous angst in the field,” said Michael S. Turner, a physicist and cosmologist at the University of Chicago, who attended the Caltech meeting.

After canceling the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the world’s most powerful physics machine, in 1993, and shutting down Fermilab’s Tevatron in 2011, the United States no longer owns the tool of choice in physics, a particle collider.

Fermilab’s biggest project going forward is a plan to shoot a beam of neutrinos, ghostlike particles, 800 miles through the earth to a detector at the old Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D., to investigate their shape-shifting properties.

The results could bear on one of the deep-seated and intractable problems in cosmology, namely why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, but there is not enough money in the project’s budget to put the detector below ground, at the bottom of the mine, where it would be sheltered from cosmic rays and able to observe neutrinos from distant supernova explosions, instead of on the surface.

Americans who want to taste the thrills of the frontiers of high-energy physics have to cast their eyes east to CERN’s collider, which is set to dominate the field for the next 20 years. Or they might look west, to Japan, which is budgeting about $120 billion in stimulus money to help recover from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and wants to use some of it to host the next big machine, the International Linear Collider, which would be 20 miles long and could manufacture Higgs bosons for precision study.

In February, in a ceremony at a physics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the team that had been designing the collider for the last decade handed over the plans to a new consortium, the Linear Collider Collaboration, directed by Lyn Evans, who built the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Dr. Evans said the next big highlight of his career would be seeing construction start in the next couple of years in Japan.

How desperately does the United States want to participate in these projects, from which the next great advances in our understanding of the universe could come?

“Our issue is that Europe and Asia are contemplating or have made $10 billion investments in particle physics,” explained Jim Siegrist, associate director for high-energy physics at the Department of Energy, who says that kind of money is not going to be forthcoming in the United States. “How we compete is a problem for us.”

Physicists are hoping to have some answers by this summer when they convene in Minneapolis for Snowmass, a planning conference named after the Colorado resort where it used to be held until the place got too expensive. In the meantime there are only questions, like what is the country’s future relationship with CERN?

The United States is presently an observer at CERN, but that arrangement expires in 2017. Joining as a full member would cost somewhere around $250 million a year and is out of the question. “Neither the agencies nor Congress is interested,” Dr. Siegrist said. Nor, he thought, was CERN itself interested in having the United States Government Accountability Office and others “crawling down their shorts.”

For only about $25 million, however, the United States could become an associate member, an outcome favored by CERN’s director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

All Signs Point to Higgs, but Scientific Certainty Is a Waiting Game

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: March 4, 2013

In their bones, physicists feel it is the long-lost Higgs boson, but in science, feelings take second place to data. So these same physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particleannounced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity. “Personally, I have no problems calling this aHiggs boson,” said Joe Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and spokesman for the leader of one of the teams, known as CMS, that reported the new particle last July. “If it’s not, I won’t mind eating my words, because it would be so much more interesting.”

He spoke on the eve of the Moriondworkshop in La Thuile, Italy, where on Wednesday CERN physicists will present the latest analysis of some 2,000 trillion collisions recorded by theLarge Hadron Collider. There could still be surprises, but so far, physicists say, the particle is on target with the predictions of the Standard Model, the current reigning theory in physics. Which is a triumph for the theorists who invented the boson, but might be a disappointment for those who dream of revolution.

“We are in post-discovery depression,” said Eilam Gross, one of the CERN physicists on the Atlas team. “What happens when you search for something and then it turns out to be exactly what you are looking for?”

What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matterwhose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter?

And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer. Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.

One thing that has hampered progress is that physicists still do not agree on how much the new particle weighs. Eyebrows were raised in December when the Atlas team reported that their two different methods of measuring the boson’s mass do not agree. They get a mass of 126.6 billion electron volts by watching for it to decay into a pair of gamma rays, and 123.5 billion electron volts when they look for a signature of four charged particles. The spread of more than three billion electron volts means the error bars for the two measurements do not overlap. The results from the rival CMS are closer together, in the middle, consistent with a mass of 125.8 billion electron volts.

Atlas physicists say the effect is most likely a statistical fluctuation that will be cured eventually with more data.

What does it matter how much a Higgs boson weighs? It could determine the fate of the universe.

In December 2012, shortly after CERN teams first declared that they had seen signs of the famous boson with a mass of 125 billion electron volts, Gian Giudice, a CERN theorist, and his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future.

The reason lies in the Higgs field, the medium of which the Higgs boson is the messenger and which determines the structure of empty space, i.e., the vacuum.

It works like this. The Higgs field, like everything else in nature, is lazy, and, like water running downhill, always seeks to be in the state of lowest energy. Physicists assume that the Higgs field today is in the lowest state possible, but Dr. Giudice found that was not the case. What counts as rock bottom in today’s universe could turn out to be just a plateau.

Our universe is like a rock perched precariously on a mountaintop, he explained, in what physicists call a metastable state. The Higgs field could drop to a lower value by a process known as quantum tunneling, although it is not imminent.

Dr. Giudice’s calculations suggest that it would take much longer than the age of the universe; the whole Milky Way galaxy could disappear into a black hole long before then. Which is good.

If that should happen — tomorrow or billions of years from now — a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light, obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.

Reports of this work caused a flurry in the press. As Jeremy Bernstein, the noted physicist and author, wrote in a recent e-mail after reading the news, “Help!!!”

But it’s not time to dial up a Mayan priest for guidance yet. The calculations assume that the Standard Model is the final word in physics, good for all times and places and energies — something that no physicist really believes. Theories like supersymmetry or string theory could intercede at higher energies and change the outcome.

The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable.

It’s a puzzle, he said, why the universe exists in such a critical state. In an e-mail, Dr. Giudice wrote, “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?”

He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.”

Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said.

“So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.”