Symmetry factor

I’m spending part of my sabbatical at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. There is a long workshop called “Physics of the Large Hadron Collider”. In addition to physics-related activities they also have a journalist-in-residence program. Currently, it happened to be Jennifer Ouellette, also a well-known blogger.

Once again, I was unloading pictures from my cell phone… The whole Einstein theme is related to the visit of Eric Cornell (2001 Nobel Prize winner), who gave our annual Vaden Miles lecture. Some of our faculty had a dinner at one house in West Bloomfield. The owner of this house has the MOST amazing Einstein-related collection! Also, if you visited Princeton recently, you might have seen Einstein’s bust not that far from the IAS. He contributed to the installation of that bust…

Today, at the conference NO-VE (IV International Workshop on neutrino oscillations) in Venice, collaboration DAMA/LIBRA claimed to see Dark Matter (DM) interactions in their detector. The effect is at the 8.2 sigma level (which means that the chance that it is a background that mimics their signal is WAY smaller than 1%). See their talk here. Here is their website.

Their search technique is based on DM interacting with their detector material (which happens to be well-known NaI), so they can trigger on detector’s “matter recoil” when DM particle hits the detector. In principle, it is a hard way to search for DM, as many non-DM backgrounds can also interact with NaI! For example, neutrons… Well, the deal with DAMA is that they look for the modulations in their signal that can appear due to Earth’s motion around the Sun (see Drukier, Freese and Spergel’s paper in Phys Rev D48). So one looks for a cosine-type signal over some years of data collecting. This cosine-type signal is very difficult to emulate by any (known) background. Nevertheless, (known) background studies are very important — and about half of the above talk is about them

This result is interesting, but still controversial… See, that XENON experiment has something to say about it — they used liquid xenon as their detecting media, which is very similar in properties to iodine in NaI that DAMA used. The thing is, they didn’t see anything…

I finally got around to update my blog. There are many things to talk about. But first, I have to finish blogging about that conference that happened more than a month ago. So here it is.

In the days 2-5 of the conference there were many interesting talks, so I can not talk about them all. One nice feature was that they introduced two special sessions for young scientists — each talk in a session was only 5 min long! You might be surprised how much info one can put into 5 min talk… Anyway, Lisa Randall gave a nice talk about warped geometries at the LHC,  where she indicated some potentially new ways of looking for extra dimensions.  Kellogg Stelle (who, among other five languages, speaks absolutely fluent Russian)  gave an excellent (but maybe a bit misplaced) talk about finite supergravity. Adam Falkowski gave a talk about Kaluza-Klein parity in Randall-Sundrum models (ways of creating stable Dark Matter candidates). Gustavo Burdman gave a talk about model building with extra dimensions… Thomas Humbye gave a nice talk about implications of see-saw mechanism in neutrinos. On experimental side, I want to emphasize final result from KTeV: Re e’/e=(19.2 +- 2.1)*10^(-4), which is a bit larger than corresponding NA48 result… but the error bars touch… Jean-Francois Glicenstein from HESS collaboration gave a talk about their Dark Matter (DM) search from dwarf galaxies with gamma-rays. They claim to put a strong exclusion bound on higgsino-type DM (one of the SUSY candidates), pretty much excluding masses of the order 80-200 GeV! This depends, of course, on the model of DM distribution, but it is a pretty strong claim! I tried to understand their result going to the original paper, but it’s not very clear. In particular, they claim exclusions of that mass range with technical gamma-ray threshold for their search of about 120 GeV (what also confuses me is that they talk about gamma rays with E > 250 GeV in their paper)… Of course, if gamma rays are produced in DM annihilations, their energies cannot exceed masses of those DM particles. That is to say, you cannot exclude 80 GeV DM particle by looking for gamma rays with energies greater than 120 GeV… N. Parua gave an experimental update on heavy meson and baryon lifetimes from FNAL without referencing any recent theoretical papers on this subject, including this seminal paper. I also learned about a cool experiment called COUPP — they managed to eat up part of available parameter space for DM. Their experiment is located in one of the FNAL neutrino tunnels - I wonder if high-energy neutrinos pose an irreducible background for them..

If you want to see the complete schedule of talks, you can find it here.

So now that I finally twisted my knee and removed from skiing, I can report on that Moriond meeting. Most of the talks from the conference can be found here, and thus I’ll only briefly comment on the talks. The morning session was about Higgs searches and in general about electroweak symmetry breaking. Curiously enough, it was callled “LHC and Brout-Englert-Higgs Mechanism” (emphasis is mine — I wonder what happened to the names of G. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, T. Kibble, P. Anderson and E. Stückelberg who also could lay claim on that mechanism…).

The first talk was, as usual, a welcome by the conference founder Jean Tran Thanh Van - although he told me later that he wants to retire form this post and this would be his last conference. This conference is, and alwys has been, organized impeccably, so I hope this tradition will be kept. The first two talks dealt with Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron in the low mass (< 140 GeV) and high mass regions (> 140 GeV), and also non-SM Higgs (Yorita, Zivovic and Haas). This curious separation is due to the fact that search techniques are very different for those mass ranges, which has to do with WW threshold. As you could guess, no discovery yet… but it was emphasized that Fermilab’s HighRise looks like an “H” which might stand for Higgs, so maybe they’d beat LHC to it… One nice thing about the analyses was that the results were presented as plots of Higgs mass vs Higgs production cross-section. This is nice, as if it is discovered, we’d know if its couplings are given by the Standard Model or not… Michel Tytgat gave a nice talk about a very cute model of Dark Matter which is jsut a neutral Higgs of some limit of two-Higgs model (”Inert Higgs”), which is a nice way to connect the two. Gustavo Burdman gave a review of holographic way of electroweak symmetry breaking. Lyn Evans gave a talk about LHC commissioning schedule (Jester wrote about that in his blog, so I’m not going to go into that) and D. Aguila talked about how LHC can help with tests of see-saw mechanism of neutrino mass generation.

The conference continued after the ski break with talks about SM physics at the Tevatron, HERA, and (in the future) LHC — talks by Han, Han, de Boer, Christiansen, Plamodon) and searches for new physics with photons and jets by Jaffre. A nice talk about Higgs as an inflaton was given by Fedor Bezrukov, which is a nice attempt to unify Higgs and the inflaton (field that drives inflation on the early Universe) by introducing non-minimal gravitational couplings for that scalar. The model that he described requires some careful choice of couplings to make sure early Universe develops properly, which almost drives him in the strong coupling limit. Also, higher-dimensional operators can be problematic… but the model is indeed cute! The session ended with a pedagogical talk from S. Kraml about SUSY Dark Matter.

I ‘ll try to update regularly from now on, but the Internet here is only available at the bar and you can gues how much work can be done at the bar….

Starting tody, I’m in La Thuille, a small skiing resort in Italian Alps and the place of annual Rencontres de Moriond conference series. This year I’m attending the section on Electroweak interactions and Unified theories. I’ll try to blog about that more or less regularily… the Internet connection here is only available in the same romm as a bar… hmm….

I actually don’t know how to become famous, it’s just a catchy title… anyways, besides other things, I wanted to share an encounter that my collaborators and I had with the popular press after we wrote this paper. I got a phone call the next day after the paper appeared on arXive from this journalist, who wanted to talk about it. Since I’m on sabbatical, I only got an e-mail from him a day later asking for the interview and phone number of my postdoc, Cosimo Bambi, who eventually talked to him and quite successfully (he was named a head of our little collaboration — excellent publicity for him, I’m quite happy about that)! So, at the end, this article appeared in New Scientist… and then got reprinted here and here, and here and …. (interestingly, Russian versions are a bit better in the description).

Another thing I wanted share is this. Being in Michigan, one feels the problems of US automobile industry almost firsthand. One thing that I heard on the radio yesterday is that General Motors had one of the worst years in their history loosing 38 billion dollars last year. That’s $38,000,000,000! In one year. And still going! Now, International Linear Collider will cost about 15 billion dollars. With approximately only 1/2 paid by the country who’ll be hosting it. And spread over at least 10 years. And might not happen if funding is not secured. My message is that $15B is a big number for an average person, but not so big for a company, let alone a country (or several countries)…

No (fundamental) physics in this post. But since I went to see new cars at the 2008 Detroit International Autoshow a couple of weeks ago, I figured some report is in order. Here are some pictures that I took during that show (this is a tiny portion of them).
There were many Chinese companies - last year I only saw one, while this year featured at least five! They make cars that look ok and would probably cost less than US-made vehicles. Some of them also look goofy (this is an electric vehicle):

The prize for the weirdest concept car goes to Mazda this year. It is a winner hands down. Do you see Xylon theme (I bet the designer likes the show “Battlestar Galactica”):

Here is another view:

The prize for the coolest new concept goes to  Saturn for their Flextreme plug-in - they even thought of a place for a Segway! I like Saturn vehicles more and more with each coming year.

Some companies are quite close to having “the real thing” — here is a “personal” hydrogen station for a Honda’s fuel cell car. If you have about $500K  you can buy it now…

But the prize for the coolest thing I saw at the show doesn’t go to a car. It goes to a TV.  Look at the picture below - some flat screen TV’s. So what? Well, the deal is that those flat screen TVs show their programs in 3D, without any glasses or anything — that’s why the lady below is holding up a hand - the image of that yellow thing sits in her palm!

I was told that there are only 11 of those TVs in existence worldwide — and onStar has 7 of them…

I’m already looking forward to the next year’s show!

I just came back from a trip to the East Coast - which explains me neglecting this blog for a while. I gave talks at the Johns Hopkins University and Univ. of Massachusetts - those places are rather close to my heart as I spent some time in both of those universities at various points in my life. It was fun to give a talk about black holes in one of those places…

Anyways, while I was out, the 2009 Presidential Budget request appeared. And it looks good for the physical sciences. Now, for DOE details can be found here. The DOE portion of the budget (in millions of dollars) for high energy physics looks as follows:
2007 actual__|__ 2008 est. __|__2009 est.

__733________|__ 688________|__ 805___
This is a healthy increase! Why am I not jumping in joy? Maybe because numbers also looked very nice in the last year’s budget, but at the end they turned into a complete disaster… and a year before… there is still quite a bit of road ahead…

Another curious thing that happened last week (besides NY Giants winning SuperBowl) was me getting into a car accident. Nothing serious, a tire, rolling on an I-95 freeway (!) hit my rental car on the front driver side. Now, what are the chances of that! All of that happened just north of the Giant’s stadium in NJ — and since I was hoping for the New England Patriots to go all the way this year — I start to suspect something….

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Added 1: New York Times has an article about that here.

Added 2: U.S. Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL-13) sent a letter to the President urging him to include $300 million for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science in his upcoming fiscal year 2008 (FY0 emergency supplemental appropriations request. Full text of the letter could be found here. I don’t know if those letters have any physical effect or could be gauge-transformed to zero.

I was listening to today’s State of the Union address by President George W Bush. Besides the usual curiosity about political implications of how the “lame-duck” Presidents frame their last State of the Union address, I was curious to see if traces of this year’s HEP/energy sciences budget disaster would find their way into the speech. Well, the President declared:

” To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow. Last year, Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding. This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge. So I ask Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.”

So far, so good. It remains to be seen how the Congress reacts on this. Hopefully, this year’s scenario will not repeat itself next year…