CMS data showing mass range excluded and possible for the Higgs boson, December 2011

CMS data showing detail of lower mass range excluded and possible for the Higgs boson, December 2011

Here it is, the latest interpretation of the largest dataset from the CMS that was officially released this morning.

After weeks of leaks, rumors and speculation it has been officially announced that the Higgs boson has been further cornered into a very narrow sliver of mass around 125GeV by independent results from both the CMS and ATLAS detectors. This is consistent with the Standard Model and previous postulates made before the acquisition of humanity’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Is this the first evidence of the Higgs boson? It could well be, perhaps. But it is still not yet a discovery.

Why?

What do these mean?

What do they show?

And how did thousands of scientists get to this point in the search for the Higgs boson?

In this UCSD-TV video exclusive,  UC San Diego Physics Professor Vivek Sharma, director of Higgs research for the CMS detector, explains the massive efforts to discover the Higgs Boson using the LHC at CERN.

Since the search began in March 2010, I have been fortunate (very fortunate) to be able to conduct an unprecedented series of exclusive interviews with Vivek Sharma; UC San Diego Professor of Physics and director of Higgs research for the CMS, or Compact Muon Solenoid detector.He is also one of two people responsible for combining all results from both the CMS and ATLAS detectors – both involving teams of University of California physicists.

In excerpts from some of these interviews Professor Sharma, ok, Vivek, shares his insights from his unique perspective as one of the key figures at the very heart of this gargantuan effort. He provides a detailed, comprehensive but clear and accessible layman’s guide to how this massive team of researchers conducted the science and produced these results, what they look for, what they see, how they (may have) cornered the Higgs, and why they do what they do.

You will be able to understand what this shows, and why it is no longer evidence for the Higgs boson

Not the Higgs. Why?

And you will be able to understand why this could be evidence for the Higgs boson.

Evidence of the Higgs boson?

You will also understand what the seemingly all-too-complex “Brazilian Flag” (above, apologies to Brazil) states so eloquently about hundreds of trillions of proton-proton collision events, putting them all in terms of the chances that what we are seeing might finally be evidence of the “God Particle”.

But more importantly, you will get a sense of why Vivek, and collectively, we, sift through this chatter and noise to find the signal of the Higgs boson, a signal that speaks to something that has always been, and will always remain, at the core of each of us.

They have tested, and are testing, everything from huge bridge columns and blast resistant structures, to wind turbines and even railroad track – yes, railroad track. A hundred and some-odd car freight train derailing due to track failure is not an inexpensive problem, so engineers are looking at track failure modes….Anyway, I digress.

UC San Diego engineers are about to take things up a notch. Actually, if you ask me, quite a few notches – and UCSD-TV will be there all the way.

It’s a mission like no other; a mission to help ensure the safety of a critical element in California’s emergency services infrastructure – hospitals.

Damage to Holy Cross Medical Center due to the Northridge Earthquake. This hospital was initially evacuated due to non-structural damage.

Our UC San Diego engineers are taking their testing exploits to new extremes with this one. While many past tests have looked at purely structural issues in terms of seismic performance, failure modes or load bearing behavior, this test is designed to look at the non-structural performance of a building.

But this is not just any building or any test – it will be the first test ever conducted that will subject a full-scale, completely finished acute care facility to extreme seismic forces.

This five-story structure will have everything found in a typical acute care facility: a surgical suite, an intensive care unit, a working elevator, heating and air conditioners including the ductwork, suspended ceilings, light fixtures, a backup generator, and all the computing and utilities services, piping and conduits found in a working hospital.

You can follow construction progress here.

Why? Well, we Californians know earthquakes, and have always led the way in reducing risks from earthquakes. One of those things we did was enact requirements for hospitals to be able to continue operations during and after a major seismic event. This test will help us find the ways to do that.

Now don’t get concerned about hospitals falling down in a quake – in California hospitals are structurally some of the toughest buildings around. It’s the stuff inside a hospital that takes a beating – all those special features found only in a hospital that get damaged so a hospital becomes just another building to evacuate – just what you don’t want to do when a hospital is needed in a quake event.

Working with the California Seismic Safety Commission UCSD-TV is producing “A Mission Like No Other” so you can understand why Californians are seeking to reduce non-structural damage to hospitals and how we are going to do it.

Oh, and then there is fire. Did I mention the part about fire testing the structure?
We’ll have to pick that up in another blog post.

“A Mission Like No Other” will air on UCSD-TV this December. Until then, check out our archive of engineering programs and stay tuned to this blog for photos, behind the scenes information and more.

Why? Do lions do that? Do chimps? How do we even define altruism? How do we study it? Does it define us, and our humanity?

In the same inimitable manner as all CARTA symposia, the eminent experts from all fields help us grapple with this enduring, very human, mystery.

CARTA’s Evolution of Human Altruism series premieres April 13 at 9pm on UCSD-TV and continues each subsequent Wednesday through April.

As Google reworks its search algorithm, I thought I’d try to snare the unsuspecting…I thought about using “sex” and “nude,” but thought better of the unsuspecting trawlers that those searches might snare…..

So, now you’re here.You won’t get free money, but you’ll get something better…go to these links and you will learn something that could change your life, or even improve the lives of many of your fellow citizens who, whether they know it or not, have been positively impacted by the work being done within the University of California. Now more than ever, we need this reminder.

First check out these videos from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. I recommend that you watch them all….but start with this one – Republic Lost. Professor Lessig makes some fascinating arguments, but when he needed all of that valuable information on high fructose corn syrup, he turned to Dr. Robert Lustig, a UCSF scientist who studies the roots of metabolic syndrome and, in this popular talk “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” describes in incontrovertible chemical detail how HFCS destroys human health.

Dr.Lustig didn’t make it up…he just elucidated the facts. What we do with them is another thing. Like the facts you’ll find at Keep California’s Promise, about the cost to restore this state’s near-decimated public education system.

Yeah, if you do the math, it’s just a dime a day…think you can handle it? But then again, if we let the UC decay, we won’t have to deal with understanding problems like how to grapple with a preventable disease epidemic that currently costs this nation over 170 billion dollars A YEAR…besides that little problem of destroying the health of the next generation.

It isn’t only the brilliant medical researchers at UCSF that are engaged in this battle – coming in April Steve Kay, Dean of UC San Diego’s number one ranked biological sciences program in the nation, will share how his lab’s research to understand our own biological clocks can help fight diabetes.

And then there is this other little problem we face– enter the UC…..UC Davis to be exact. Peruse these recent research findings on renewable energy from the Institute of Transportation Studies to see the facts for yourself.

Or watch this UCSD video on “Powering the Planet” to get the facts that might very well scare you, as they did me.

But then again, they’re just the facts. And they’re free. Courtesy of the University of California….

“175 years ago, Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos. He arrived at the Galapagos as a creationist, and he left the Galapagos as a creationist.”

Darwin, of course, was a keen observer. And he not only left the Galapagos as a creationist, he also left with many observations of the natural world–observations he used to help develop his idea of evolution by natural selection. His ideas were based on the physical evidence the natural world presented him. And you’ll get the same opportunity with these new talks from this fascinating CARTA symposium.

OK, you won’t get a trip to the Galapagos, but you will get a journey through time from all over Africa in a dazzling array of evidence presented directly to you by the individuals who are digging, unearthing and bringing to light — in shards, bits of teeth, phalanges, crania and climatic records — the evidence, the record, the hard proof of the very, very early history of Hominids – our Clade, our Family.

It is one of, if not the most, complete and compelling collections of evidence on this subject I have ever seen presented to the public and, as Tim exhorts at the beginning of the symposium, “there has never been a symposium like this, and it is exceedingly unlikely that there will ever be another one.”

Don’t miss the series. Really, don’t. It starts airing every Wednesday night in February, beginning February 2 with Tim White’s fascinating and compelling overview of the search for evidence of our earliest ancestors, and Andrew Hill’s vivid picture of what our earliest ancestors’ world looked like, and how it influenced their evolution.

On another note, a dime a day, just one thin dime….actually, less than one thin dime….two CRV redemptions…”What?” You say?

You may be aware of the dire future facing the University of California and public education as a whole. To gain a little perspective, here are some amazing facts and research about the financial future of public education or, more accurately, what it could be, and how little it would really take. Do the math, it’s all there, more than you need, really…and well, the math doesn’t lie.

And, of course, don’t miss the singular Ira Flatow as he explains why I like science so much — because, as he shows in his acceptance address for the Nierenberg Award, “Science is Sexy” (debuts January 12).

In the meantime, here are a few things I’ve run across that you might enjoy exploring– a few holiday gifts, if you will.

I recently came across an artist from UCSD who takes an interesting, evocative and different perspective of the seismic test capacities at UCSD. See her videos, recorded at UCSD’s SRMD test facility, at her website here – and don’t overlook her other fine work.

This is just a fun little app to play with, which actually is quite captivating and revealing. Go here.

And finally, on a more reflective note, the videos at Symphony of Science are inventive, sometimes goofy, but do resonate in a certain way.

Enjoy, and best wishes for your holidays.

Full-scale metal building test specimens like this one were subjected to some serious shaking

Then in October,  take a look at how a pioneering wind energy provider, Escondido, California-based Oak Creek Energy Systems, is looking to the future of wind power by collaborating with UCSD professors and students at the Englekirk Center to gather seismic performance data on wind turbine structures in order to advance the next generation of wind turbines. We recently visited Tehachapi Pass, the richest wind energy field in California, to see the future of renewable energy resources evolving right before our eyes. And you’ll get to see it too, along with the most powerful (and humongous!) wind turbines in production – and learn how they are just the tiny siblings of what the future has in store for wind energy.

The future of wind energy will be even bigger and taller than these, already 280 feet high at the turbine

Over 2,500,000. That stunned even me….

Over 2 and a half million downloads. That isn’t clicks. That’s viewers saving the programs so they can be watched online or on the go with a mobile media device. Now, of course, that isn’t a blip compared to that Superbowl wardrobe failure, or even that owl cam….but it is the most reputable, relevant and current information available on a wide variety of ocean science topics, straight from the source — unadulterated, unabridged, un-spun.

So you can join in and see what’s so interesting to so many of your fellow viewers, we’ve prepared a summer long line-up of the most frequently downloaded programs. Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday night from June through August you can find a Perspectives on Ocean Science program airing on UCSD-TV. And don’t forget, you can always view the programs on-line, or download them and take them with you….and join the interested millions who already have.

Man-on-the-scene Matt LeBourgeios on March 30, 2010

As explained to me by our man-on-the-scene Matt LeBourgeois, the last week or so was only preparation for what Vivek calls “The Rediscovery of Physics”. Even though my occasional visits to the LHC status page showed 7TeV beams and what looked to me like a lot of luminosity (they were, and there was), there were a lot of not-so-subtle nuances to what was going on. Last week or so was the beam operators; the people responsible for injecting protons into the 27 kilometer race track and providing focused, stable and energetic beams tuning their instrument to perfection.

The line traces the 27 kilometer track of the LHC on the French - Swiss countryside...

As Matt related, the operators maintain that what they provided in that first week or so was not intense enough for “discovery physics”; that is, really compelling huge numbers of protons to collide – but it was exciting enough for our young Ahab (I’ll get to that in a later blog) to whet his appetite.

Actually, it was the opportunity CMS needed to tune its instrument, doing among other things something called timing scans, which has to do with setting the triggers on the CMS. This is the realm where Matt works, where he is one of many monitoring all sorts of different parameters and data involved with timing to make sure things are working, or for working out problems when they arise. In his typically gracious manner he calls himself “just a pawn.” I’ll maintain whatever one does on this job is going to mean something pretty darn important one day. Anyway, as Vivek explained, the CMS is like a 100 million pixel camera. The catch, as Matt pointed out, is that each pixel has its own shutter, here in his own words: “the point of the timing scan is to sync the 100 megapixels of the camera. Instead of thinking of having to hit one camera button to take a snap shot, think of it as each ‘pixel’ has its own button, and these timing scans ensure that we are hitting all 100 million buttons at once.” Whew! I can only assume if that doesn’t happen, the resulting “picture” lacks focus.

So CMS now has the shutters timed and the beam operators are really putting the pedal to the metal. The latest from Vivek is “…now squeezing the beams like hell – so more rapidfire collisions”. What? Vivek explained that the beams that collided on March 30 were something like the diameter of a hair, now the operators are tuning the beams to be something much thinner (?!!)- with the same number of protons in the beams. They’re focusing and concentrating the beams. Why? Same number, smaller space = greater density = greater luminosity. Vivek has a vivid description of those less focused March 30th beams in this video clip.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another way to put it is like shooting two shotguns at each other – you get two bunches of shot, each with 10 to the 11th pellets (that’s like, oh, a hundred billion pellets in each), flying towards each other in the hope that some of the pellets hit directly head-on with all their momentum going into their mutual deconstruction. The more concentrated the shot pattern, the better the odds of collisions. So when the operators can provide focused, stable beams, then people like Vivek and Matt and their colleagues can really do their work – which is PHYSICS; and the operators can post messages like “enjoy the collisions” and “physics beams” on the LHC status page here. Now I’ve simplified, and probably to the horror of physicists out there, over-simplified this. Be certain, there are a lot of precise and very specific protocols involving terms like beta-star and picobarns that indicate the level of performance and quantity of data the physicists are getting – very strict parameters that are adhered to, because remember-they’re working with things we can’t see, have never seen before, and whose existence we can only infer, albeit very precisely and with great certainty, but only through the evidence they leave behind.

So what is that evidence? Well in the energy range – or mass – (remember it ALL boils down to this – E=mc2) in which the LHC will be looking for the next year or so, the signature of a Higgs boson of about the mass of an entire gold atom (which is about 185 GeV!), will be the remains of two W bosons. And that – which Matt and Vivek and a few thousand others will be looking for – will be events that show specific combinations of electrons, muons, or electrons and muons AND their corresponding neutrino counterparts, which show up only as a precise amount of missing energy – something called Missing Transverse Energy. If the event shows all three of those parameters to an exceedingly high degree of certainty, then it will get some interest, and Vivek, Matt and a world of physicists will pore over it. The catch is, one event won’t be telling. They need several such events, enough to satisfy something called 5 sigma criterion – I know you all know what that indicates, sorry I’m playing catch up, but for those like me, it is a term describing a statistical certainty to a level of less than one fault in a billion. In other words, there is only less than a 1-in-a-billion chance that they’re wrong. So you need a lot of incontrovertible events, and to get several such events…you need thousands, millions and ok I’ll hyperbolize, (but I have a feeling it isn’t really hyperbole) – probably billions of p-p collisions to get those events. Just to add another twist, as Matt told me the other day, W boson production, without the creation of a Higgs first is almost a hundred times more likely to occur. So there will be a lot of W bosons that show up WITHOUT evidence for Higgs….hence, collisions, collisions, collisions, “squeeze the hell” out of those beams. And then there are the usual gremlins encountered with complex systems. Vivek recently showed me how one such event looked interesting, but one of the parameters was due to an instrumental glitch – so, “close but no cigar” and into the trash with that one….so, collisions, collisions, collisions.

In the meantime, as the operators keep perfecting their craft, “squeezing the hell” out of the beams, with the p-p events occurring at an ever accelerating rate, Vivek and company are happy to do what Vivek describes as “Rediscovering Physics”. It isn’t just an idle exercise or coincidence of smashing protons. As of the Ides of April Vivek explained that the LHC has “discovered” every major particle revealed in the 20th century, up to about 1983, when Carlo Rubbia discovered the the W and Z bosons. Or that is – it has rediscovered them, and this is important why?

This is a new instrument, a new machine, and as Vivek explained, if you don’t see what you already know about with this machine, then you may have a problem with your instrument, and basically, you can’t trust the results….So now, working at heretofore unattained energy the LHC has tallied a gamut of fundamental particles, starting with the pi mesons of 1947. Their discovery bolstered the existence of Up and Down quarks. Oh, and the LHC attained this in the first 15 minutes of operation at 7TeV. Then it was the Strange (50′s) and Charm quarks of the 70′s and on and on. As of this writing they’re still in the hunt for the last few particles – variations of the Z boson, a hunt which might end at any moment the way they’re smashing zillions of protons (my hyperbole). Even for a naive eye the data is totally convincing, you’ll be able see it soon when it is published and when you do, I think you’ll agree it’s waaaay 5 sigma. And that’s a good thing. The LHC is seeing what it is supposed to be seeing – so when new things show up – those electron-neutrino (elnu), muon-neutrino (munu), MTE (Missing Transverse Energy) triptychs of data – Vivek and friends will know it isn’t a phantom – but instead, perhaps, the sign of the holy grail, the great white whale, or as it has been called – the god particle…..Bonne Chasse mes amis!

Just moments after the first 7TeV proton collision ever recorded occurs in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector – for which Vivek directs the Higgs search, Matt caught Vivek’s comments as the first record of the event appeared.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that the big press event has subsided, and the terms LHC, CERN and Geneva fade as our attentions are prodded to such things as Ricky Martin’s personal life, the economic recovery and improving relations with China (unless you’re Google)-all issues with varying degrees of import; the real work for thousands of scientists begins. As Vivek so prosaically put just moments after viewing the record of the very first 7TeV proton collisions ever created “…the events are beautiful, the detector is working like a dream….you know, it’s taken twenty, twenty-five years to build and this is what it is for, finally, the baby is delivered, now it has to grow…”.

And they are quickly exhorting their baby to take its steps and grow. Shortly after the champagne corks were gathered up and the press hit “send” to file their media, Vivek’s cohorts in this huge endeavor slowly, or not so slowly, started putting the pedal to the metal. Still basking in the excitement, Vivek hints at what the next steps for their baby would be:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And as later reported by Vivek, on the very same day the CMS recorded more than 500,000 p-p (proton-proton) collisions in just a few hours. And on Wednesday and Thursday of this auspicious week, they accumulated more than four million collisions at 7TeV, with plans to increase the collision rate by orders of magnitude in the next weeks. Baby steps indeed….

So just what are we looking at in this video? Vivek explains in response to a presumably UK journalist:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their baby – our baby – has started the marathon, and we’ll be pacing alongside with Vivek and Matt. Keep checking back, and don’t forget to use your iPhones and browsers to take a peek at LHC status, and in a way, take part, however vicariously, as we venture on into this new epoch of understanding that started just a few days ago.