The Higgs Boson's Twin Could Reveal Our Universes Dark Sector

[n2doc]

AUTHOR: BOB HENDERSON


THE WORLD’S MOST powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, has failed to find any of the hoped-for particles that would lead physicists beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. But it’s possible that the LHC has been producing such pivotal new particles all along, and that we’re just not seeing them.



“The core of the story,” said David Curtin, a physicist at the University of Maryland, “is that the LHC could be making particles which are totally invisible, which decay some distance away from the production point, whether it’s millimeters or many kilometers, and which are connected at the most fundamental level to some of the most important theoretical mysteries that we have.”

Such hypothetical particles are called “long-lived,” because their lifetimes would far exceed those that the LHC was designed to detect. If the LHC is indeed producing these particles, then it’s likely that some are fleeing the accelerator’s underground tunnel, shooting up through the earth, and potentially exploding like fireworks in the sky above the nearby farm fields as they decay back into ordinary matter.

To catch the flash of those fireworks, assuming they exist, Curtin and collaborators Henry Lubatti of the University of Washington and John Paul Chou of Rutgers University have proposed building an enormous new detector that would stand in those fields, looking rather like a really big barn. The three recently published their proposal in Physics Letters B, christening their detector Mathusla (which, in the grand tradition of tortured physics acronyms, stands for MAssive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra Stable neutraL pArticles). The name is a nod to the mythical figure who lived for over 900 years.

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https://www.wired.com/story/hidden-higgs-dark-sector/

[longship]

1. Wait a minute! Neutrinos are regularly detected.

And they are notorious for not interacting with anything, except very rarely via the weak nuclear force.

An undetectable particle can be detected by missing momentum in an interaction. That's how neutrinos are found to be produced although they are not directly detected.

What about that?

[Igel]

2. They're difficult to detect.

So they have large detectors that work 24/7 to find them.

And they're incredibly abundant.

From www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/Papers/Popular/Scientificamerican69/scientificamerican69.html :
"The flux of solar neutrinos at the earth's surface is on the order of 10^11 per square centimeter per second"

Yeah, that means every cm of ground facing the Sun is receiving 100,000,000,000 neutrinos per second.

The LHC produces nowhere near that many particles per year.

I suspect that they just know they're dumping in a lot of energy, a lot of momentum, and don't monitor each and every interaction. They found the Higgs not by watching momentum from when the Higgs was produced but by looking at Higgs decay products. If you have the entire event caught on film, then you check momentum.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1703/1703.03952.pdf discusses Higgs production. I might understand bits if I took the time to puzzle over it for a while. Not gonna.

[longship]

3. Well, that's how the neutrino was discovered.

And momentum is conserved in every interaction, always.

I was only suggesting that it might be an appropriate channel for finding new stuff. And in fact, if folks don't think conservation of momentum wasn't used to help find the Higgs... well, I don't know what to say.