Melbourne Dispatch: A First Coming To Terms with Discovery

Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

Where to begin? The 4th of July, 2012 will remain burned in the memories of those of us fortunate to be delegates at this historic 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (#ICHEP2012) in beautiful Melbourne, Australia. My day began in a Boeing 747, dodging tropical clouds high above the Pacific Ocean. One connection in Sydney, two shuttle buses, and one shower later, I found myself in the plenary hall at the stylish and serene Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Projected onto the giant Melbourne screen was a live video connection to the CERN amphitheatre in Geneva, where the much awaited Higgs boson search update talks, timed for ICHEP, were about to commence. My sentiments immediately turned to Dec. 13, 2011, when I was at CERN to live-tweet the “tantalizing Higgs hints” talks for McGill. This time around, I was among a handful of physicists who’d agreed to help tweet the Melbourne conference on behalf of CERN.

Your Melbourne correspondent, with other ATLAS colleagues, including former and future spokespeople Peter Jenni and Dave Charlton. Credit: Claudia Marcelloni

The seminars that followed have already been widely discussed in blogs, newspapers, and other media, right down to the choice of font used. Through my tweets, under the handle @AWarb and hashtag #ICHEP2012, I endeavoured to convey minute-by-minute happenings while maintaining some editorial restraint. It felt a little like being a play-by-play broadcaster at a momentous sporting event, but one in which I played for one of the teams, the score was basically tied, and the teams were both separately and mutually victorious.

Minutes before the talks began, there was a distinct air of anticipation amongst the Melbourne delegates. On our giant screen, we watched as the CERN camera zoomed to one of the Geneva attendees, a placard reading “Ciao Mamma!” visible on his desk. The audience in Melbourne chuckled nervously. Then we saw Professor Higgs and the other living progenitors of the theoretical Higgs-mechanism concept entering CERN’s amphitheatre, to loud applause. Melbourne reacted as well. But when CERN’s Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer entered the room and prepared to initiate the proceedings, our Melbourne hall fell utterly silent.

Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS collaboration, began with the first talk. Excitement at CERN and in Melbourne mounted as the results, initially articulated carefully for each of the studied decay channels, culminated in a discovery-level combination to reveal, unequivocally, that we had a new particle on our hands. The CMS team had even analyzed its data enough to be able to quote the new particle’s mass with an impressive precision of under 0.5%. Moments later, I tweeted “Day’s big question: are these Standard Model #Higgs bosons, or something else? There’s something there, but what is it exactly?”

Then, it was spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti’s turn to present our ATLAS collaboration’s Higgs search results. We ATLAS collaborators already knew our outcome, but it was nevertheless thrilling to see it presented in this electrified forum. When Fabiola’s talk climaxed with our combined-channel statistical significance, the Melbourne delegates erupted in sudden loud applause followed by an immediate, eerily stunned, silence. Appreciation for the historic importance of this amazing day had now fully gripped the hall.

Meanwhile, an interesting sequence of events had occurred. CERN’s press release had been embargoed until the start of the second hour of the event, during Fabiola’s ATLAS talk. The moment it went public, my Twitter feed began to light up with scientific commentators, news organizations, and others heralding the discovery. Because of the timing, the ATLAS discovery punchline actually got sent to the rest of the planet before Dr. Gianotti reached it in her talk to the CERN and Melbourne scientific audiences.

The ICHEP meeting is now in full swing here in Melbourne. We’ve had detailed talks and discussions about the key ingredients of this new particle discovery. Other delegates and I have been tweeting updates with both Higgs and non-Higgs news. We’ve also been getting interesting questions from the worldwide public, some scientifically detailed, some more in the category of outreach. We’re gradually getting better at putting Greek and other scientific symbols into tweets! G’day mates, from Down Under.

Andreas Warburton tweets as @AWarb and is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University. For information about his research and other interests, see http://twitter.com/#!/AWarb.

Quark Excitement: Is there anything smaller?

Credit: Austin Miller - The Mangusta Art Collective

The Large Hadron Collider commands many superlatives. One of the most useful of these is that the LHC is our planet’s most powerful human-built microscope. The higher the collision energy, the tinier the distances you can study.

At parties or in elevators, high-energy physicists often begin their answers to the “So what do you do?” question by mentioning the atom. From there, they work down to the nucleus, and then, if they’re lucky enough to be in a quiet party or a tall building (or a slow elevator), they get to the quarks, electrons, maybe even gluons. At this point the person asking the question is sometimes still willingly around. He or she may then even ask, “What’s inside a quark?”

The answer is that we don’t know for sure. The most successful theories of particle interactions are currently quite content with the notion that quarks are point-like particles with no spatial extent. As experimentalists, though, we’re compelled to use this magnificent new LHC microscope to probe the frontiers of minuscule distance scales empirically.

How to look inside quarks? If a quark could be broken apart, even the LHC’s energy may not be enough to pull this off. But if we could use the LHC to make a quark that’s excited, then we would know that quarks likely have substructure. As in the elevator, to get your head around this it’s handy to start by thinking in terms of atoms.

Excited atoms are all around us, for example inside light bulbs (when they’re turned on, that is). They’re more energetic than regular atoms because their electrons are in higher energy states. When the electrons return to their ground states, the excited atoms release photons of light, causing the light bulb to glow, and return to being ordinary atoms. The details about how all this works are important, but not for this blog post. What’s important here is that an atom would not be excitable if it weren’t made from smaller parts.

Credit: anonymous

Using the ATLAS detector at the LHC, we have begun to apply this very same idea to check whether it’s appropriate to consider quarks to be point-like at these high energies. If the LHC were able to create excited quarks, we should observe them as they return to being regular quarks and emit photons of light. In a paper published in the Physical Review Letters journal, our ATLAS collaboration reported that, were a hypothetical excited quark to exist, implying quark substructure, such a state of matter most likely would not have a mass less than the equivalent of 35% of the LHC’s 2011 collision energy (which was 7 trillion electron-Volts when this data set was accumulated).

This recently published result involved a study of jets of particles, presumed to be caused by a regular quark, produced in association with photons of light. By examining the directions and energies of these jets and photons flying out from the LHC’s proton-proton collisions, we looked for evidence that they arose from the disintegration of a heavier new exotic parent particle, like an excited quark. While the search for quark substructure by way of excited quarks was one aim of this study, we note that the results can be applied generically to any hypothetical new particle that decays to a jet and a photon. These findings complement earlier and ongoing LHC searches for pairs of jets (dijets), which could also arise from quark excitations and other interesting exotic processes.

With the 2012 increase in the LHC’s energy to 8 trillion electron-Volts, and other increases in the future, we expect to continue to extend the reach in our understanding of matter’s most fundamental constituents. It’s all very exciting.

• See related ATLAS News article at http://www.atlas.ch/news/2012/quark-excitement.html

Andreas Warburton tweets as @AWarb and is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University. For information about his research and other interests, see http://twitter.com/#!/AWarb.

Tweeting live #Higgs boson updates from #CERN

My view of CERN's auditorium, 2:15h before seminars began.

“If it’s just a fluctuation of background, it will take a lot of data to kill.”

Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration, made this statement on Dec. 13, 2011 during a special seminar I attended at CERN. Within the minute that followed, I hurriedly concocted a tweet, tacked on #Higgs and #CERN hashtags, and sent Fabiola’s weighty comment out onto the WWW.

CERN, where the WWW was invented, is the main European particle physics laboratory. I was at the lab for a week to discuss physics and the  performance of the ATLAS detector, a 7000-ton apparatus used to examine remnants of high-energy proton collisions delivered by CERN’s 27-km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), straddling the Franco-Swiss border.

This turned out to be no ordinary week. The 2011 LHC program had yielded a fecund data sample, and we needed to take stock of our most promising new-phenomena searches. By far the most anticipated were those of the Higgs boson, hypothetical pieces in the emerging puzzle of the tiniest known subatomic particles. Signal rumours had been swirling around the planet in blogs and other media. I was asked by the media relations department at my home institute, McGill University, to live tweet the Higgs update event. I already knew our ATLAS measurements, but was keen to see results by our competitors, the CMS collaboration, running a complementary detector on the opposite side of the LHC. Exciting times!

We owe much of this excitement to Ernest Rutherford who, while a McGill professor of Experimental Physics early last century, unwittingly helped to kick off the Higgs hunt through his Nobel Prize work on radioactivity. Modern theories that posit the existence of one or more types of Higgs particles seek to unify – into a more symmetric and fundamental theory – two basic forces: 19th-century electromagnetism and Rutherford’s 20th-century radioactivity. As if that weren’t enough, observing Higgs particles would also help to reveal a mechanism by which various fundamental particles are endowed with their non-zero mass values. This gets at the very essence of the physical universe.

More recently, my McGill colleagues and I have taken part in the search for Higgs bosons using the Fermilab Tevatron matter-antimatter collider near Chicago. Just last summer at McGill University, Dr. Adrian Buzatu defended a PhD thesis using Tevatron data to set the world’s best limits on Higgs boson production in the low-mass region that is now revealing hints at the LHC. Adrian recently took up a postdoctoral position in our ATLAS collaboration, working with the University of Glasgow group.

In December, I entered CERN’s auditorium three hours before the seminar was to begin. Within about 30 minutes, all available seats and aisles were jammed. A mob formed outside the auditorium door, but security guards were able to maintain control. Unable to work in all the nervous energy and jostling, I tweeted, “You’d think it was John Lennon coming to CERN today.”

You’d think it was John Lennon coming to CERN today. #Higgs #CERN

— Andreas Warburton (@AWarb) December 13, 2011

At long last the ATLAS and CMS talks began. Both collaborations had searched extensively for several different signatures, scenarios by which a Higgs particle could be created from LHC collision energy before disintegrating into lighter particles.

Given our detectors’ sensitivities, and the colossal Higgs-mimicking backgrounds, we knew in advance that our samples wouldn’t suffice for a statistically robust 2011 discovery. Nevertheless, both ATLAS and CMS showed suggestive traces in a variety of Higgs signatures. Enticingly, both collaborations ruled out overlapping mass ranges and recorded hints at similar masses.

These indications are thrilling. In this kind of science, discoveries take time and are often preceded by whiffs. We’re also cautious. Our 2011 results could be chance background fluctuations, tantamount to tossing six coins and getting tails every time. Only when our observations are flukier than tossing 20 tails in a row will we claim a discovery.

The 2012 data will likely enable us to observe or rule out the Higgs boson. Either of these outcomes would constitute exhilarating, 21st-century science. I look forward to tweeting about it.

For the event’s archived tweets, which contain links to further information, go to this page.

The above blog posting was adapted from an outreach article requested by the McGill Reporter newspaper. The ATLAS and CMS experiments have now submitted their Higgs search papers based on the 2011 data set.

Andreas Warburton tweets as @AWarb and is an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Physics. For information about his research and other interests, see http://twitter.com/#!/AWarb.