Searching for a Higgs Boson & Faster Than Light Neutrinos

1. Searching for a Higgs Boson& Faster Than Light Neutrinos Mike Cooke & Dave Schmitz Fermilab

2. Inside an Atom

3. The Standard Model • Explains 3 of 4forces: • Electromagnetism (γ) • Weak force (W & Z) • Strong force (g) • Not gravity! • The matter you are familiar with ismade from the3 circled particles

4. The Higgs Boson • Original problem: Standard Model particles are massless?! • In 1964, Peter Higgs (and others!) invented a way toadd mass to SM particles • Must add one extra particle,the “Higgs boson” • Current problem: We haven’t seenit!

5. Making a Higgs Boson Fermilab Tevatron _ p p CERN Large Hadron Collider We create new matter using: E=mc2

6. Looking for the Higgs Boson • Fermilab’s Tevatron just finished a 10 year run: Proton-antiproton collisions: 634,000,000,000,000Higgs bosons potentially made: 11,000 • Hard to separatefrom backgroundthat looks verysimilar

7. How Can We Find the Higgs? Look everywhere!

8. How Can We Find the Higgs? • Use all of the information we have! • Create a special variable that answers the question: Does this event look like a Higgs or the background?

9. Latest Results LHC sees some extra events, but not enough to claim they see a Higgs boson

10. Expect Excitement in 2012! • Tevatron (CDF & D0) will share final results! • LHC should have enough data to exclude a Higgs if it doesn’t exist or observe it if it does! • Finding it means we have observed all SM particles & we’ll begin to study the Higgs in detail • No Higgs means the LHC might make huge discoveries over the next few years, since something must give particles mass!

11. Neutrinos The Standard Model

12. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory proton beams neutrino beams

13. It was once thought the entire Universe was made of these three particles? protons neutrons electrons NOT EVEN CLOSE!! In fact, we now know that for everyproton,neutron or electron, the Universe contains A BILLION neutrinos!* *Not to mention dark matter and dark energy

14. “Relic” Neutrinos 10,000,000 neutrinos In every cubic foot of space in the Universe, there are 10,000,000 neutrinos which were created in the Big Bang and are still zooming around!

15. Supernova 1994D Whenever a star explodes as a Supernova, the most powerful explosions in the Universe, 99% of the energy is carried off by neutrinos!

16. In fact, every star is an incredible neutrino factory throughout its lifetime, including our star, the Sun.

17. 93 million miles 8 minutes 2in x 2in square How many neutrinos in 10 seconds? 0 sec. 0 2 sec. 3,400,000,000,000 4 sec. 6,800,000,000,000 6 sec. 10,200,000,000,000 8 sec. 13,600,000,000,000 Working on my neutrino tan 10 sec. 17,000,000,000,000

18. You don’t have to look to the cosmos to find neutrinos. For example: A banana emits about 1 million neutrinos/day from decays of the small number of naturally occurring radioactive potassium atoms they contain!

19. Turns out that you can use an intense beam of protons to create an intense beam of neutrinos creates short-lived charged particles quickly decay into neutrinos nm impinge upon a fixed metal target nm nm nm nm energetic protons delivered by the accelerator nm which are focused forward by a strong magnetic field

20. protons from accelerator 1/3 mile decay pipe neutrino detectors NuMI Beam Line target 170 ft ~ 1 mile 350 ft University of Chicago HEP Seminar – January 31, 2011

21. Where are all those neutrinos headed? And they make the journey from Fermilab to northern Minnesota in 1/400th of a second! 5,400 tons, 2,300 ft  6 miles MINOS 456 miles

22. The OPERA Experiment A very similar setup to the Fermilab neutrino beam They installed some additional state-of-the-art devices for doing precise timing measurements at CERN and in Italy 450 miles

23. The OPERA Neutrino Velocity Measurement ~1012 protons In these beams, trillions of protons hit the target together spread over about 10 microsecondsand you don’t know which proton made the neutrino you observed in your detector. So, how can you measure a 60 nanoseconddifference?

24. The OPERA Neutrino Velocity Measurement These proton “bunches” hit the target twice every 6 seconds for years and years… … so, many millions of times About 15,000 of those “bunches” made a neutrino that was seen in the OPERA detector The red line is the average pulse shape of the 1012 protons that hit the target together every 6 seconds The black points are the measured time of the neutrino interactions – (speed of light)*(distance from CERN to OPERA) The remaining difference of 1043.4 nanoseconds is mostly offsets caused by electronics (1 ft. of cable ≈ 1 ns)

25. The OPERA Neutrino Velocity Measurement But how much exactly? What they find is 985.6 ns 1043.4 ns – 985.6 ns = (57.8 ± 7.8 ± 8.3) ns Critical to carefully map out all the timing offsets caused by the various electronics and the detector at both CERN and the OPERA detector

26. The OPERA Neutrino Velocity Measurement Speed of light, c = 299,792 km/s Speed of neutrino (OPERA) = 299,800 km/s vneutrino = c ×1.00002

27. What Would Einstein Say? If confirmed, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the finding. The impacts on our understanding of the Universe could be immense. It is obviously critical to confirm such challenging and important measurements by multiple groups in multiple ways. As a first step, Fermilab is currently upgrading our time measurement systems at our neutrino beam to repeat the OPERA experiment.

28. extras

29. And look for them to oscillate nm nt nt nm nm nm nm nt nm nm nm nm nt nm nm nm nm nm nt nt nt nt nm nm nm nm nt nm nm nm nm nt nt nt nt nm nm nm nm nm nm nm nt nm Distance But you need a LOT of neutrinos because of how feebly they interact

30. This could be possible if: The ne, nm and nt are not the only way of looking at the neutrinos but There are neutrino states that mix together to makeup ne, nm and nt and these neutrinos have different masses ne nm nt n1 n2 n3 n1 n2 n3

31. neutrinooscillations 401 Hz Quantum mechanics particle  wave mass determines frequency wave 1 400 Hz + If neutrinos (ne,nm,nt) are actually mixtures of multiple waves with different frequencies (different masses)… wave 2 401 Hz + 400 Hz They can interfere like any waves and change the neutrino’s flavor! wave 1 + wave 2 time (distance) www.scienceclarified.com

32. m m nm nm m t nm nt

33. So what might they tell us? Neutrinos are very veryverylight Why? How is it that we exist, anyway?