I watched an excellent video about what we have learned at LHC (see
this). Three runs RUN1, RUN2, and RUN3 have been completed and now we know where the limits for the applicability of the Standard Model are.
The immediate successor of LHC will be high-luminosity LHC operating from 2029- 2030 onwards for ten years. Future circular collider (FCC) will start to operate in the late 2040s. Electrons and positrons will collide and the collider (Higgs factory) will act as a high precision collider.
The philosophy is that high precision might allow us to develop a theory allowing us to solve the various anomalies of the standard model. In future, the experimentalists would not be merely testing whether a given extension of the standard model might solve some anomalies but trying to identify more general deviations from the standard model. But is this enough? What has been lacking from theoretical physics since the times of Einstein and his contemporaries, is philosophical thinking challenging the basic assumptions. Can one make progress by merely measuring more precisely?
What did we learn at LHC?
The video explains the basic anomalies. The anomalies are also discussed in detail by Crivellin and Mellado (see this). The following list defines the boundaries of the region of phenomena that the standard model can explain.
- Toponium exists although it should not.
- W mass deviates from the predicted mass.
- g-2 anomaly of muon is claimed to disappear in lattice calculations using only quarks and gluons but does not disappear when hadronic data are used as an input.
- Lepton universality is violated in some meson decays.
- Penta and tetra quarks, whose existence is not denied but not predicted by the standard model.
- There are anomalies associated with the CP violation of the CKM matrix.
- The axions, proposed to solve the problem due to the strong CP violation predicted by QCD, have not been found and the strong CP violation is too weak to explain matter antimatter asymmetry.
- Quark-gluon plasma predicted by QCD did not behave like gas but a perfect liquid and the transition to quark gluon plasma seems to occur at several energies rather than single phase transition point.
- SUSY was believed to solve the hierarchy problem involving the fine tuning of the Higg couplings but no evidence for SUSY particles was found.
- WIMPs as candidates for galactic dark matter have not been found.
Toponium anomaly as an indication for M89 hadron physics
I have discussed various standard model anomalies from the TGD point of view in various articles. Here I will consider only the discovery of the toponium, which is one of the latest surprises. The Standard model does not deny toponium's existence but according to the standard intuition it should not exist.
- The lifetime of the top quark is too short for the formation of toponium. There are of course proposals for solving this and also other anomalies but the problem is that these proposals typically solve only one anomaly. The lifetime of the standard top quark candidate with mass m\simeq 172.5 GeV is τ=5× 10-25 s. This time is shorter than required for QCD hadronization processes (10-23-10-24 s). This is why it has been believed that toponium does not exist.
- The toponium was however discovered both by LHC and ATLAS and its lifetime is estimated to be 2.5 × 10-25 s. Toponium is suggested to be a quasi-bound state or a resonance appearing when top quarks are produced very near to the threshold energy (see this and this). Toponium decay is triggered by a weak decay of one of its constituents rather than being a strong decay. Both ATLAS and CMS verified the existence of this state with a resonance width of about 3 GeV.
Consider now the basic ideas of TGD view of hadron physics and standard model in general.
TGD leads to almost inescapable conclusion that there must exist an entire hierarchy of standard model physics assignable to the triality +/-1 color representations defined by color partial waves of quarks and antiquarks in CP
2. Leptons would appear in triality 0 color partial waves (see
this and
this).
- The color multiplets of quarks of a given standard model physics would combine to form color triplets, which would serve as building bricks of hadrons of a given hadron physics (see this, this, and this). These hadrons would correspond to a hierarchy of p-adic mass scales, proposed to be labelled by ordinary and Gaussian Mersenne primes. The longer the p-adic scale, the higher the dimension of the color multiplet.
For the observed leptons, color representations would combine to form color singlets but also analogs of mesons as bound states of colored leptons might be possible (see this). Only at energies near CP2 mass would color deconfinement for incoming and outgoing states be possible.
- Ordinary hadrons would correspond to the Mersenne prime M107. The nucleon of M89 hadron physics would correspond to the mass scale 512 mn and therefore to the LHC energy scale. The transition from M107 hadron physics to M89 hadron physics would take place at quantum criticality. The phase transition usually interpreted as a creation of the quark-gluon phase could correspond to this phase transition (see this). At quantum criticality the value heff/h would scale up the Compton length scale of M89 hadrons. This would reflect long range quantum fluctuations. This re-interpretation of what has been identified as quark gluon-plasma would solve various anomalies associated with this identification mentioned already in the list of anomalies (see this).
The existence of M89 hadron physics can have dramatic implications. For instance, a dramatic modification of the model of the Sun (see this) can be considered.
- The ratio of the p-adic length scales associated with M107 and M89, characterizing the Compton lengths and also defining the geometric size of nucleons as 3-surfaces, is 512. The assumption is that the geometric size of the M89 hadron with a large heff is the same as for M107 hadron at quantum criticality implies heff/h= 512. The sizes of M89 hadrons would be the same as for ordinary hadrons at quantum criticality for the transition from M89 hadron physics to M107 hadron physics.
- I have proposed the identification of various bumps observed at LHC, originally identified first as candidates for SUSY particles but then rejected, in terms of M89 mesons (see this and this).
The large mass of the official top quark raises the question whether it could be M
89 quark created at quantum criticality.
- A natural guess is that the lifetime of top quark at quantum criticality is scaled up heff/h= 512 to .25 × 10-21 s. The corresponding distance scale would be .75× 10-13 m, which is longer than the nuclear size scale!
- A reasonable guess is that the hadronization time scale for M89 is for heff/h scaled down by factor 1/512 due to decrease of the p-adic length scales. This p-adic length scale corresponds to the geometric size scale of the causal diamond CD= cd\times CP2 assignable to the region in which the phase transition occurs. This local phase transition is discussed here. The increase heff→ 512heff keeps the geometric time scale associated for hadronization the same as it would be for ordinary hadrons and determined by the p-adic time scale L(107) assignable to ordinary hadrons.
What happens to the rate of hadronization? The phase transition increasing the value of heff guarantees that the TGD counterpart of perturbative theory,, still applies. "Mother Nature loves her theoreticians" (see this) is one way to express this principle. Since the zeroth order term in the TGD counterpart of the perturbative expansion, giving the classical approximation, does not depend on heff, the classical approximation improves as heff increases.
The rate for M89 hadronization is proportional to the hadronic mass scale m(89)=512m(107). Since the geometric time scale is L(107) by quantum criticality, the short lifetime of top does not prevent the formation of toponium. Quantum criticality could quite generally increase the probabilities for the formation of bound states of very short-lived particles.
The basic objection is that the official top quark as M
89 quark would most naturally correspond to genus g=0 for the partonic 2-surface and serve as a counterpart of u quark. The actual g=2 U type quark should have a lower mass.
- There is indeed evidence for a top quark-like state at much lower mass from Aleph. The mass is estimated to be about 30 GeV or 28 GeV (see this). This has motivated the question whether the two candidates for the top quark could correspond to a scaled variant of the top. In the TGD framework, the p-adic length scale hypothesis might allow this (see this and this).
- What about the toponium in this case? There is an old anomaly reported by Aleph at 56 GeV (see this) and there is reference to an old paper: ALEPH Collaboration, D. Buskulic et al, CERN preprint PPE/96 052. What was observed was 4-jet events consisting of dijets with invariant mass around 55 GeV. What makes this interesting is that the mass of 28 GeV particle candidates would be one half of the mass of a particle with a mass of 56 GeV particle, quite near to 55 GeV. Could this state be the toponium as g=2 U quark (see this and this)?
If this picture is correct, the official top quark would more naturally correspond to the genus g=0 and therefore to M
89 u quark. Could the poor understanding of the family replication phenomenon and of the origin of the CKM mixing explain this mis-interpretation?
- The CKM matrix V is empirically determined from charged currents (W decays). The matrix elements of type VUD, U ∈{u,c}, D ∈{d,s} reflect the CKM mixing of d and s quarks. Unitary conditions bring in the matrix elements VtD and dependence on top quark mass. Both beta decays and kaon decays provide information about VUD, U U ∈{u,c}, D ∈{d,s}. These two kinds of constraints lead to slightly different outcomes \cite{bpnu/partano} for V.
- Could a wrong identification of the top quark mass cause the discrepancy? In TGD, the official top as the g=0 quark of "dark" M89 hadron physics created in the transition to quark-gluon plasma would induce a leakage of probability inducing a genuine violation of the unitary for the CKM matrix.
- In TGD, the description of family replication has topological explanation and CKM mixing reduces to topological mixing (see this and this). A model for the transition between M107 and M89 is needed to see whether the new interpretation can be consistent with what is known about creation of official top quarks.
- The prediction is that the official top as an M89 u quark is accompanied by an M89 d quark so that toponium should be a member of an isospin triplet. The M89 counterparts of π and ρ mesons should exist. The discovery of the M89 d quark, perhaps through the discovery of an isospin triplet for toponium, with nearly the same mass as the official top quark, would force us to take the TGD view seriously.
See the article
Official top quark and toponium as particles of M89 hadron physics?, the article
The findings of RHIC about quark gluon plasma from the TGD point of view or the chapter
Comparing the S-matrix descriptions of
fundamental interactions provided by standard model and TGD.
For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.
For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.
