Higgs factory a 'must for big physics'
A top physicist says the construction of a "factory" to produce Higgs boson particles is a priority for the science community. In an exclusive interview, Nigel Lockyer, head of America's premier particle physics lab, said studying the Higgs could hasten major discoveries. He said momentum in the physics community was gathering for a machine to be built either in Europe or Asia. "Our field uniformly agrees that would be a good thing," he told the BBC. The Fermilab director added: "The Higgs is such an interesting particle - a unique particle."
[...] Physicists had hoped that the LHC would turn up evidence of physics phenomena not explained by the Standard Model. So far, efforts to detect new physics have come away empty-handed, but studying the Higgs in more detail might break the impasse.
A successor to the Large Hadron Collider would be designed in a way that allows scientists to zero in on the Higgs boson. The LHC works by smashing beams of proton particles together, but the collisions that produce the Higgs also produce many other particles. This makes it complicated to work out which collisions produce the Higgs boson. A different type of particle smasher, called an electron-positron collider, should produce only a Higgs and another particle called a Z boson.
This makes it more suitable for detailed study of the Higgs' properties. Dr Lockyer said there were currently discussions over a new electron-positron collider in China, and a linear collider that could function as a Higgs factory in Japan. Alternatively, it could be housed at Cern after the Large Hadron Collider comes to the end of its operating lifetime. [...] But he stressed that there was still plenty to come from the LHC, which will undergo a major upgrade in the 2020s.
Related Stories
The Higgs boson reveals its affinity for the top quark
New results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC reveal how strongly the Higgs boson interacts with the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark, corroborating our understanding of the Higgs and setting constraints on new physics.
The Higgs boson interacts only with massive particles, yet it was discovered in its decay to two massless photons. Quantum mechanics allows the Higgs to fluctuate for a very short time into a top quark and a top anti-quark, which promptly annihilate each other into a photon pair. The probability of this process occurring varies with the strength of the interaction (known as coupling) between the Higgs boson and top quarks. Its measurement allows us to indirectly infer the value of the Higgs-top coupling. However, undiscovered heavy new-physics particles could likewise participate in this type of decay and alter the result. This is why the Higgs boson is seen as a portal to new physics.
A more direct manifestation of the Higgs-top coupling is the emission of a Higgs boson by a top-antitop quark pair. Results presented today, at the LHCP conference in Bologna, describe the observation of this so-called "ttH production" process. Results from the CMS collaboration, with a significance exceeding five standard deviations (considered the gold standard) for the first time, have just been published in the journal Physical Review Letters [open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.231801]; including more data from the ongoing LHC-run, the ATLAS collaboration just submitted new results for publication, with a larger significance.
Also at ZME Science.
Related: Confirmed: Yes, it is the Higgs
Successor to the LHC Could be a "Higgs Boson Factory"
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:03PM
Why has your face collapsed, sow? Because you tempted men. Because you sneered at men. Because of men's rights. Because of justice!
The man deemed that silence was too good for the sow. As such, he made her sing for weeks before finally allowing her to embrace the absence of motion.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:06PM (2 children)
3. Will Bruce Willis kill the bad guy?
2. Will the Titanic really sink?
1. Will China get to build the next giant scientific machine?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:24PM (1 child)
No [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:39PM
Also, depends on who the bad guy is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jackal_(1997_film) [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @08:18PM
This is not really news. The International Linear Collider (ILC) project has been kicking around for 20+ years. It was planned for Fermilab near Chicago but was canned because US couldn't afford it. Japan has been mooted as a venue for the past 5-10 years but the Japanese government has not agreed to build it. CERN has its hands full with LHC; and is backing an alternative technology, so-called "CLIC".
In terms of technology, the ILC provides about 50 % more energy than LEP (the old CERN accelerator before the LHC) with a cost of $10 billion. It is something of a dead-end technology - you couldn't extend ILC to higher energies.
Disclaimer: I work for a competitor project which was kicked in the teeth by Nigel Lockyer when he became Fermilab director.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 10 2018, @08:26PM (3 children)
You mean, the successor of the LHC will be a Large Electron-Positron Collider? [wikipedia.org] ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @10:46PM
Do you propose a time recyclotron?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 11 2018, @05:41AM (1 child)
Hrmmm, seems far more likely to produce a huge amount of gamma rays since that is the usual product of electron-positron collisions. I can see elementary particle collisions being simpler than protons which are thought to be quark triplets and thus, not a simple particle. But they're still going to spew a lot of stuff unrelated to the desired bosons above.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday April 11 2018, @06:10AM
The main problem/background is, indeed, beamstrahlung. But they thought of that sort of thing. Here is a slightly older reference, for example:
http://flc.desy.de/lcnotes/notes/localfsExplorer_read?currentPath=/afs/desy.de/group/flc/lcnotes/LC-DET-2007-012.pdf [flc.desy.de]