Monday, October 04, 2010

Is the new physics at LHC "approximately unavoidable"?

Tommaso Dorigo has written a summary about a highly interesting conference talk by Guido Altarelli in 2010 LHC Days in Split (slides can be found here).

The talk begins with the question "Is it possible that Higgs will not be found?". The general conclusion is that if Higgs is not found then some other new physics is "approximately unavoidable". One very general reason is that the unitarity of electroweak theory is otherwise spoiled. Altarelly saw also a reason for worry. The new physics should should emerge rather abruptly: the general view is that there is no evidence for it existence from the previous experimental work. How can it is possible that the new physics lurking just behind the corner manages to hide itself so completely?

TGD predict Higgs and supersymmetry and also weak confinement

This touched something inside me since the questions whether TGD predicts Higgs and standard space-time super-symmetry have shadowed my life for a long time. When the notions of bosonic emergence and understanding of super-conformal symmetry in terms of partons identified as wormhole throats emerged, it became clear that boson with quantum numbers of Higgs identified as wormhole contact with opposite throats carrying fermion and antifermion quantum numbers is bound to exist. Also an appropriate generalization of broken space-time supersymmetry exists and reduces to N=1 super-symmetry at low energy limit.

The emergence of the weak form of electric-magnetic duality during this year led to the realization that the wormhole throats behave like magnetic monopoles since the CP2 projections of these 2-surfaces are homologically non-trivial. The only manner to avoid macroscopic magnetic monopole fields is magnetic confinement appearing as a side product of electro-weak symmetry breaking and possibly also of color confinement. In the case of electroweak symmetry breaking this would mean that a wormhole throat carrying lepton or quark quantum numbers is accompanied by second throat with opposite Kähler magnetic charge and carrying quantum numbers of neutrino and antineutrino neutralizing the weak charge of the elementary fermion and screening of weak force. One can speak of weak confinement. For quarks the neutralization of magnetic charge need not be complete and valence quarks could be Kähler magnetic monopoles giving rise to hadrons which have neither magnetic nor color charges.

Physical elementary particles would be string like objects with length of order weak length scale. This would certainly represent new physics which could become visible at LHC. This piece of new physics (TGD predicts also many other pieces) would resemble the good old hadron physics for which the predecessor of the recent super string theory provided a satisfactory description. Regge trajectories would be one striking signature of this physics both at the level of states and scattering amplitudes. The string tension of these trajectories would be enormous: in the first estimate 2107-89=18 times higher than that for low energy hadrons. Mass scale would be about .512 TeV to be compared with the collision energy of 7 TeV of LHC. The proton of this physics would have mass of about .512 TeV (if one believes on naive p-adic scaling) and is expected to be unstable against decay to ordinary hadrons. Lifetime should be long since otherwise also the ordinary proton is expected to be unstable against decay to scaled down hadrons with say p-adic length scale of electron (, which corresponds to the largest Mersenne prime which does not define super-astrophysical p-adic length scale).

p-Adic thermodynamics and the emergence of string like objects from massless partons

While reading the summary about Guido's representation I realized that I have been talking for years about scaled up copy of hadron physics at electroweak length scale. What distinguishes the string like objects of this hadronic physics from those of electroweak physics? Or do they represent two different aspects of something more general? The obvious answer would be that color confinement is not involved with weak strings and that this is the basic distinction. This answer seems to be correct.

  1. Dirac equation in M4×CP2 predicts that free fermions -also leptons- in general correspond to in non-trivial color partial waves of CP2 and that the correlation between color and electroweak quantum numbers is wrong although quarks correspond to triality t=1 and leptons to triality t=0. This was a strong objection against TGD until I realized that super-conformal invariance could resolve the problem. The lightest leptonic (quark) states are color singlets (triplets) and colored super-conformal generators can generated the anomalous color so that lightest leptons and quarks are colors singlets and triplets. p-Adic mass calculations are consistent with this picture. The contributions from enormous bare mass squared (conformal weight) whose values are dictated by the color partial waves of quarks and leptons are compensated by negative tachyonic mass squared (conformal weight) of the vacuum state.

  2. p-Adic thermodynamics assumes that elementary particles correspond to representations of super-conformal algebra characterized by enormous string tension. Elementary particle mass scales emerge thermodynamically from a fundamental mass scale which corresponds to CP2 mass, which is roughly 10-4-10-3 times Planck mass. Massless states with vanishing conformal weight are thermally mixed with those with non-vanishing conformal weight and enormous value of mass squared given by string mass formula.

  3. Weak form of electric-magnetic duality, the basic facts about modified Dirac equation, and also twistorialization of quantum TGD force to conclude that both strings and bosons and their super-counterparts emerge from massless fermions moving collinearly at partonic two-surfaces. Stringy mass spectrum is consistent with this only if p-adic thermodynamics describes wormhole contacts. For instance, the three-momenta of massless wormhole throats could be in opposite direction so that wormhole contact would become massive. String like objects would therefore correspond to the wormhole contacts with size scale of order CP2 length. Wormhole contacts would be the fundamental stringy objects and already these have the correct correlation between color and electroweak quantum numbers.

  4. One can of course ask whether the anomalous color could be neutralized in the weak scale? This is not possible. p-Adic thermodynamics with string tension defined by electro-weak length scale would make completely unrealistic predictions.

How the new physics around the corner manages to hide so well?

The basic worry of Guido Altarelly is expressed by the question of the title and it seem that the new physics predicted TGD might provide a satisfactory answer to the question.

  1. What seems to be a prediction is that the weak length scale serves as the confinement scale for the string like objects with second end containing neutrino pairs with electroweak isospin. Regge trajectories of weak bosons and Higgs is one consequence. The new physics would behind the corner would be made virtually invisible by weak confinement. The replacement of these neutrino pairs with more general states would give a lot of new physics.

  2. Of course, Nature could choose to scale up the weak scale to say Mersenne prime M61 meaning weak bosons with mass scale 512 higher than weak scale. This would be more or less equivalent with the disappearance of weak interactions and the new weak physics would emergence in discontinuous manner via phase transition. That an entire weak physics would just disappear from existence without any warning sounds of course weird! In reality of course the phase transition would take place for a small portion of the stuff created in the collisions. The scaled up weak bosons would also decay in time scale which is by a factor 1/512 shorter than than the life time of weak bosons. The challenge is therefore to detect very small signals from background.

  3. Whether a scaled up counterpart of hadron physics exists at weak scale remains an open question. There is evidence for scaled up variants of leptohadrons for which both ends would contain charged leptons in color partial waves. For these states at p-adic mass scales characterizing ordinary leptons there indeed exists experimental evidence.

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