pension333: Is naturalness already hidden within the Standard Model? | Jon Butterworth

Maybe the Standard Model is even more wonderful than it appears. Maybe we really don't need supersymmetry. Plus, other difficult topics, ouzo and a big Greek wedding

In a somewhat bizarre end-of-the-summer interlude, I just spent two nights and a day in Corfu at a Summer Institute on particle physics. Originally I intended to stay longer, but embarrassingly I agreed to give a lecture here months ago and then forgot. I also didn't realise at the time that it coincided with the end of the school holidays... a tricky time when one of your children is starting a new school and your partner is a school teacher swamped with preparation for the new term.

I was not popular at home, and the best I could do was sort of zoom in, lecture, and zoom out again. Thankyou Easyjet. Also for the pull-out table on which I am writing this as we scud over the Adriatic.

Actually in some more detail, it was: Zoom in, listen to a very enthusiastic Greek wedding until 3am, sleep briefly, swim, eat and drink a big and lovely lunch, lecture, spend an evening discussing physics, sleep and zoom out.

I have never been to Corfu before. In case you are as ignorant as I was, it is snuggled up against the Adriatic coast where Greece meets Albania, has quite a lot of cultural connections to Britain, and was never part of the Ottoman Empire. They play cricket on the green under the walls of the old fortress. And the Duke of Edinburgh was born in the big house ("Mon Repos") where we had the meeting. Though my taxi driver was keen to point out that "We're not especially proud of that." Well, nor am I, but hey...

Over lunch the UK parliament's vote on Syria came up. Amongst this randomly unrepresentative sample of Greeks and other Europeans, the consensus was that the vote against bombing was a proud moment for British democracy. Unlike many people, I am not totally sure what the best course of UK action (or inaction) is regarding Syria, but I tend to agree that parliament did well.

Lawyers are supposed to take on an unpopular defence case and fight it to the best of their ability. If they lose we are all the more sure that their client was guilty. This is a public service. Likewise the parliamentary opposition is there to oppose rather than fall into line behind Government. They forced a debate and the Government failed to make the case. Whatever happens now, the fact that the decision to start bombing wasn't a forgone conclusion is a good thing for our democracy. Given that the opinion polls say 70% or so of the population oppose the UK bombing Syria, it would have been very odd and unrepresentative for Ed Milliband to pretend there was a consensus.

Over dinner I sat opposite Holger Beck Nielsen, the eminent theoretical physicist who I will always think of as the backwards-in-time-Higgs-guy, and who I once helped rescue from a pile of snow in Spaatind, Norway, during another particle physics school. With Nikos Irges, we were discussing naturalness, and the possibility that the Higgs mass isn't fine-tuned, but arises naturally from Standard Model calculations. If so, it would have to do this in a subtle way which we haven't fully understood yet (there have been quite a few papers on the arXiv about this recently) and this may well point to some deeper principle behind our theory which we're not really aware of. This may not mean there are loads of new particles or forces for us to discover (as there would be if the solution to the probem is supersymmetry, for example) but it would be fascinating and new.

The best analogy I have read of for the "naturalness" or "fine tuning" problem of the Higgs mass is this one from Don Lincoln about bank accounts. Briefly, the Higgs mass gets lots of big quantum corrections, some positive, some negative, which have cancel each other out in an apparently miraculous way for the Higgs mass to be sensible. Following Don Lincoln, this is a bit like a bank account which has huge inputs and outputs during the month, but balances at exactly zero on the last day of every month. Looking at this behaviour, an accountant would be unlikely to think this was a coincidence. There is probably some principle underlying the operation of the account which forces this to happen. It is this kind of principle we are looking for with the Higgs. Supersymmetry remains one possible answer, introducing a new particle (transaction) for every existing one, with the opposite sign. As is quite widely discussed now we have yet to see any evidence of supersymmetric activity in our account. But it maybe there is something built into those transactions we already know about which guarantees the balance, we just haven't worked it out yet. If we were to work it out, it would show the Standard Model to be significantly more wonderful that it already appears, and maybe we'd learn how to manage our money better.

Don't worry I am not about to make some tenuous connection between Syria and particle physics, like an Alan Bennett sermon. The only connection is they are both tricky and both on my mind.

Gatwick approaches, and back to school. And you know, isn't life a little bit like that...

Jon Butterworth

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2013/sep/02/corfu-particlephysics

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