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RE: Connecting the fate of the universe to the Higgs boson
You are right, in fact when I said "the big picture" I was referring to the "micro" AND the macro world. I'm aware that the standard model, by itself, does not include or explain the general relativity explanation of gravity, the baryon asymmetry, the expansion of the universe, dark energy, (you add what I don't remember)... But it is showing to be a useful tool for describing reality. I'm not waiting for the famous "Theory of everything", as it sounds unreasonable with our current tools, but it would be exciting to have a satisfying explanation of how these two extremely different world can coexist :-)
Many (including me by the way) are actually working on that. For instance, tackling the dark matter stuff in particular.
Wow, I've talked just once to a small team of physicists who were working on dark matter while i was working on a portion of code for their simulation. There I understood how little I know about the math you use... You guys are simply amazing, I think I'm not exaggerating when saying that you are doing one of the most difficult job of the world.
May I ask you what is the current subject of your research?
Many things actually. Let's try to summarize.
I study new phenomena in particle physics, where you replace the Standard Model by a more general context. I am interested in many things, like supersymmetry (you may have heard the name, otherwise you can possibly see here), vector like quarks (new quarks), new phenomena connected to the Higgs, new phenomena connected to the top quark, dark matter at colliders and in the universe, etc...
I also compute precision calculations that would allow precise measurements in the case of a new discovery, or precise limits in the case of a non-discovery (quantum chromodynamics in fact).
I also take part to the development of simulation software connected to the physics at the LHC (starting to move on the machine learning side), and I am involved in the studies that will lead to decide which collider experiment may be the next one in 20-30 years.
I think I got everything. Just ask questions about anything, I would be more than happy to answer :)
Oh man, you are offering candies, chocolate bars and ice cream to fat kid!
So, since we have no hard evidence of supersymmetry, how much a successful experiment (ex. supersymmetric particles detected by the LHC) will impact the direction of your work and what would be the fate of the standard model?
Moreover, I'm pretty familiar with Machine Learing, since it is vastly related to my current job, how is it used by LHC physicists?
P.S. Sorry if I'm asking too many things, if i had the opportunity i would ask even more, but it would take hours of conversation. Anyway thanks for your time :-)
Well, for the moment, as you can guess, I am open since we have not a single hint of anything. Let's assume we see something. Showing that this something is supersymmetric is already a huge task on its own. It is more likely that we may conclude that the something is supersymmetry, or theory B, or theory C or ...
Take the infamous 750 GeV excess of 2 years ago. There were more than 400 theory papers explaining the excess... In any case, if there is an excess and if I agree this may be something new (and not background fluctuations), I will start moving forward to try to get what it could be and how to get more information.
In fact, there is a long path behind us before we could claim about something new. But my research will definitely partly move along that path. And the Standard Model will still be an active field of research. The reason is that whatever is the new theory, it must give back the Standard Model in the low energy limit. The Standard Model will just be extended, but the lower energy predictions may not really change.
This is becoming more and more used (I am myself learning it at the moment). It is current used for object reconstruction (getting what we see in a detector), analysis better design, scan of huge parameter spaces and more.
It is nice to see this kind of attitude in scientists like you.
When I worked in the "Academic world" I met (too) many people working a lot just to get published, thinking little about their results and p-hacking what disagreed with their hypothesis. Fortunately peer review exists :-)
Aside from that little rant, I am really happy i found your blog.
Particle physics is still an exotic field to me and unfortunately i don't have the time to dive in the deepest aspects of this field, but i am an enthusiastic reader and i am already enjoying all of your posts, especially your Quantum Mechanics Lessons.
I look forward to your next post :-)
The "publish or perish" stuff is still very present. However, there are area of science and places in the world, where quality is more important than quantity. I am happy to see particle physics in Europe (and in France in particular) to pay less and less attention to the citation counts.
And by the way, thanks a lot for passing by my posts. I am more than happy to discuss with commenters (about anything, even if far related to the topic :p).