Lepton-Photon 2011 and Higgs

Lepton Photon 2011 sumposium will be held at Tata Instutute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. The event has been already noticed by Peter Woit and Lubos Motl . The symposium will begin at Monday morning with reports about Higgs search. Every particle physicist is of course eagerly waiting announcement: either about evidence for Higgs at some mass value in the interval 110-150 GeV or of total exclusion of Higgs in this range. Fewer of us are waiting something around 145 GeV but not identifiable as Higgs;-).

My own expectations are somewhat non-standard.

1. As I have explained many times (see for instance this and this), TGD predicts that Higgs like particles exist but since all gauge bosons become massive all Higgs components are "eaten". This expectation can be motivated by simple twistorial considerations theoretically in zero energy ontology which in TGD framework replaces standard positive energy ontology. Also new view about Feynman diagrammatics based on geometrization of Feynman diagrams is involved.

2. Something is needed to preserve the unitary of the theory and the 15-year old prediction of TGD is that instead of Higgs entire new hadron physics characterized by Mersenne prime M₈₉ =2⁸⁹-1 replaces Higgs. p-Adic mass calculations lead to this prediction and predict that its mass scale is 512 times higher than that of ordinary hadron physics.

3. The masses of hadrons of this physics cannot be predicted completely but very little additional information is needed to fix the masses. The 145 GeV bump reported by CDF (but not confirmed by D0) does not allow interpretation as Higgs and TGD based interpretation would be as the pion of M₈₉ physics. This would allow to predict masses of M₈₉ ρ and ω and there are in the first approximation identical and equal to 325 GeV. Evidences for bumps at these masses have been found.

What is the experimental situation concerning Higgs? There is some statistical evidence for a bump in the interval 140-150 GeV discussed by Phil Gibbs and even rumors about bump around 144 GeV. It could be Higgs or something else. If the rumor has some truth in it, a lot of work is needed to check whether it is scalar, pseudo-scalar (as M₈₉ pion would be), or something else.

Suppose that they announce in Lepton-Photon 2011 that there is something consistent with Higgs at 144 GeV? What will happen? Those believing in Higgs will be happy for some time. It will probably take year or two to learn whether it was really Higgs or something else.

1. What puts of course the bells ringing is that the mass corresponds to 145 GeV of CDF bump which did not allow identification as Higgs. Certainly CDF and D0 will compare their analysis carefully and certainly people will try to find explanation for the discrepancy. Maybe even explanations in terms of new physics might emerge.

   [In highly speculative TGD inspired explanation which I take only 1/4-seriously this new physics could be "darkness" of M₈₉ hadrons meaning that the value of Planck constant for them is non-standard one: this could mean that M₈₉ pions leave under some circumstances the detection volume as dark particles and remain undetected.]

2. Pseudo scalar or scalar?: this will certainly be the crucial question. The decay to two monochromatic photons is a clear signature for pseudo-scalar and could finally demonstrate to me that a pion of M₈₉ hadron physics is in question (colleagues of course would propose different explanations such as technicolor!). The tell-tale signature would the decay rate completely fixed from anomaly considerations and could allow to distinguish M₈₉ pion from Higgs decaying also to two photons. Pseudo-scalar property predicts of course also other signatures for the distributions of decay products.

3. Also evidence for other mesons such as ρ and ω will emerge if TGD is the correct theory. As already mentioned, for ρ and ω of M₈₉ hadron physics indications already exist and their masses are predicted correctly by TGD assuming 145 GeV mass for M₈₉ pion.

I dare to to speculate that if Higgs leaves, nothing can prevent p-adic physics from creeping in. Some-one has said that when the time is ripe for a new idea, nothing can prevent its breakthrough. As a matter fact, it is difficult to believe that after 16 years from the first variant of p-adic mass calculations predicting correctly the masses of known particles, predicting a lot of new physics, and even stored in arXiv (still possible at that time!) colleagues are still wasting their time by studying extremely complex variants of Higgs mechanism with no hope about what might be called understanding. This represents an extreme example about the power of social pressures even in science. Somehow the healthy skepticism has turned into conformism freezing all progress.

Be as it may, I think that many colleagues share with me the belief that these years will be a critical period which can profoundly modify the fundamentals of theoretical physics. My hope of course is that my life work will turn out to be the theory- not for personal vanity but because it would mean profound modifications of the existing world view: most importantly of the ideas about life and consciousness. These consequences would be far more important than the implications for particle physics.