Wednesday, January 05, 2011

If I only had time...

Lubos Motl has a beautiful posting about the twistor revolution- Lubos talks about minirevolution but I would drop the "mini" away. Lubos gives links to two new articles by Nima Arkani-Hamed and collaborators. A Note on Polytopes for Scattering Amplitudes and Local integrals for Planar Scattering Amplitudes.

Unfortunately, I have not just now the time to start reading of the articles. My own proposal for the twistorialization of TGD is based on zero energy ontology in which fundamental particles are massless fermions so that twistor approach should work. All particles, including also string like objects in CP2 scale defined by wormhole contacts, would emerge from these fermions assignable to the opposite light-like throats of wormhole contacts connecting two space-time sheets with Minkowskian signature. This picture leads to a generalization of the Yangian symmetry associated N=4 SUSY: the conformal group of Minkowski space is replaced with super-conformal algebras since point like particles with partonic 2-surfaces.

Since also virtual particles are pairs of massless fermions (with possible different signs of energy) very strong constraints on virtual momenta emerge guaranteeing UV finiteness. A resolution of also the infrared divergences plaguing the amplitudes of even N=4 SUSY comes from the zero energy ontology predicting in its strongest form that spin 1 gauge bosons are massive- even gluons and photon have small mass serving as IR cutoff: same applies to graviton. All components of Higgs (in TGD sense) should be eaten by gauge bosons and that also gluons have Higgs partners suffering the same fate. This has also a generalization to super-partners of gauge bosons and Higgs. Only the pseudo-scalar partner of Higgs analogous to second Higgs in MSSM would survive the massacre. LHC will show.

The formulation leads to the identification of space-time surfaces as 6-D sphere bundles identified as certain holomorphic surfaces in CP3× CP3 as a dual to the description as 4-surfaces in M4×CP2. The rapid scan of the first paper of Nima and collaborators demonstrated that they have found that the simplest amplitudes could be interpreted in terms of surfaces in CP3× CP3. This might of course be a complete accident and need not hold true generally.

Lubos also tells that CDF sees 3.4 sigma top quark pair asymmetry in proton-antiproton collisions. The asymmetry would be roughly five times larger than predicted by QCD. The asymmetry requires that the quark-antiquark pair annihilating to top quark pair can do so by coupling not only to gluons and to a new boson which has axial or partially axial coupling so that interference term would produce the asymmetry.

What comes first to mind in TGD framework is exotic Z0 boson but this does not work because the interference term vanishes in this case since gluonic and Z0 terms transform as color octet and singlet respectively. Axial vector color octet was suggested by the experimenters. I do not however see any deep reason for why one could not consider also pseudo-scalar octet. TGD indeed predicts that all gauge bosons should be accompanied by scalars and pseudo-scalars with same quantum numbers: also gluons. Scalars should be eaten to give the third polarization to gauge bosons. Could the coupling to a pseudo-scalar variant of color octet Higgs give rise to a contribution interfering with the contribution of spin zero virtual gluons and in this manner give rise to the asymmetry? Maybe there is simple objection but I am not able to invent it now. More complex option would be color octet excitation of Z0.

5 comments:

Ulla said...

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44707

Javier said...

I had read that post, and other previous posts of Lubos in the Twistor affair.

I also read some entries in your blog where you said you were interested in the theory.

Well, I had in the past many other things to study. My only knowledge of twistors was the corresponding chapter in Penrose's book "the road to reality".

Now, at last have begun to read some key articles in the topic, and although I find it interesting and undoubtedly it is an elegant formalism that simplify calculations and provides some intriguing questions I think that it is still a bit far of being useful in realistic theories (I mean N=4 supersymmetry is everything but realistic).

Well, of course if you find time you could fit it properly into your TGD ;)

Matti Pitkänen said...

I hope that I find time. The problem is that almost every day I learn about new interesting thing related to particle physics or biology or something else. Experimentalists have taken the lead while theorists are continuing desperate wandering in landscape.

The technicalities are horrible and the challenge is to abstract the essentials.

I think that N=4 paves the way to a modification of both string theory and field theory approach through postulate that Yangian symmetry is exact symmetry.

I have proposed how zero energy ontology gives rise to both UV and IR finite loops and this approach already makes predictions. For instance, all gauge bosons should be massive. Even photon and gluons should have small mass and all Higgs components (also the predicted colored ones) should be eaten by the gauge bosons. Fascnating that LHC is able kill this prediction.

Anonymous said...

"Benveniste gave evidence for water memory" : he gave not. Even Montagnier admits that Benveniste's "results were not 100% reproducible"
and have not been reproduced elsewhere.
Benveniste seen "as a fraudster" : on the contrary, NATURE's editor wanted to check the delicate procedure (one assitant succeeds, the other not); minutious examination by a professional could help. It did not work.

Why people are loosing their temper about such problems ? Controversy is usual in science, and can be solved in a calm and patient way.

Best wishes

Matti Pitkänen said...

To Anonymous:

Your comment was probably intended to a second posting. My views about water memory began to change when I was in conference sometime around 2000. I learned that these people are serious researchers. Later I have met more people involved and now know that the attitude towards water memory are determined quite too often solely by the basic belief that life is nothing but complex chemistry. I also learned that Benveniste continued his work and what Montagnier is doing is also replications of results of Benveniste and collabotors.


Discussions with skeptics- or rather, attempts to discuss with them- have finally made clear to me that rational communication with them is very difficult since they simply "know" and refuse to read anything which might force them to change they attitudes. Just as you do they tell that either magician Randi or Nature's editor has long time ago settled the issue or something similar!

Calmness and patience is just what is needed and especially so in the camp of people calling themselves skeptics. Plus intellectual honesty.