Cari Cesarotti
speaker
212 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Cari Cesarotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One, because it introduced an extrasymmetry, which again, we all love. And if there's a way for a symmetry to exist, oh boy, do we want it to exist. Right.
And the problem that are really famously addressed is exactly this hierarchy problem, is that if you want to understand why you have a very, very big number as a prediction, but you see a very, very small number experimentally measured, the easiest answer is there's a symmetry that cancels something, right? A symmetry is a fancy way of just saying that there's basically a copy of something.
So the symmetry is a way of explaining why two big numbers should almost exactly cancel. So supersymmetry, as we could have seen it before the Large Hadron Collider turned on, would have been an amazing way of explaining why the Higgs boson has a mass of around 100 GeV instead of 10 to the 18 GeV.
So that was kind of the most exciting promise is that there was a fundamental reason why this particle was so light. And there was expectation of all these new particles that we would hope to see. And it was going to be an amazing time. And people were even worried that we couldn't find the Higgs boson because there'd be too many of these other super partners.
Unfortunately, we turned on the LHC and we did not see the superpartners. Supersymmetry as theorized in its most beautiful pure form of having the maximal symmetry is not something that's probably realizable at this point. However, there are versions of it in which you can introduce new particles or new interactions that take you away from that perfectly symmetric case and break the symmetry.
So, you know, of course these theories still exist and it's still worth looking for, assuming that we have the tools to do so. But at some point you're not solving the fundamental question that you asked, or you have to introduce something that basically replaces the fundamental question that you were asking. So it becomes a bit of a patchwork solution rather than a global solution.
And that's something much less attractive.
Yeah, I mean, it is definitely something that really is a marker of a very healthy theory in physics, I think, is when it can sort of address many problems at once versus just, you know, picking one problem and trying to, like I said, patchwork it.
So, yeah, it was it was a really beautiful theory that had a lot of reasons to be motivated, could address a lot of questions that we had about the standard model. And, yeah, the fact that we didn't see it, I think, has put us into a little bit of a crisis in terms of the theory world in the particle physics community.
We could have had it all.
Right. Yeah. And I mean, it is... I think in particle physics, certainly if you look back at the history, there's been a bit more of a give and take between theory and experiment. And so we were functioning for a long time before the Large Hadron Collider came on. We had the Tevatron at Fermilab, which really did make important discoveries too.
But really going up to that sort of energy frontier that we could have... with the LHC was so important for the field. And we were really driven by theory for a long time. And we had this beautiful promise that there was going to be something at 100 GEV. We had many predictions that were just fundamentally breaking down that told us there had to be something up there.
And we hoped it was the Higgs, but it could have been other things too. But we knew that there was something up there. And now we just don't have that theoretical promise, right? Is that we just know things are broken and we haven't yet been able to debug the standard model.
So, yeah, to me, it kind of feels like now it's the time to let experiment drive a little bit and see what see what's up there. And maybe as theorists, we can look at data and get inspired again for what might be a good solution.
I am of the opinion that yes, the Large Hadron Collider is definitely still a machine that has some discovery potential. I think we have this kind of picture. Certainly, people who know a little and not a lot about collider physics have an idea that you know, the Large Hadron Collider just turns on and then it's like this Boolean output, like new physics, no new physics.
And there's just so many subtleties that occur between colliding the particles and a physicist understanding what's going on, right? So the way that we choose what events to look at, the way that we analyze the events, the way that we... interpret the events.
Like there's so many things in which you could introduce a bias that would skew you away from understanding fundamentally what physics could be going on. I don't think that it's probable that we'll discover something new at the LHC, but is the question, could there be hints of something new? Absolutely.
Yeah, and this is kind of what I did my PhD on, in fact, is the idea of how we can sort of robustly look for new physics effects. Because again, we're likely not going to get... At this point with the LHC, we're not just going to see some beautiful new resonance just falling out at a perfect sharp peak at like 2 TeV. It's possible, but it's probably pretty unlikely.
So you kind of have to use more fundamental theoretical tools to say, you know... where are inconsistencies possible to show up versus let me just wait for the most beautiful evidence of new physics to fall into my lap.
That's what I hope.
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