Carl's Upcoming Talk at Hawaii Conference

[marcus]

Best of luck with the talk!
Enjoyed the koans
http://deoxy.org/koan/29

 

[CarlB]

The computer system lost my updated slides so I went with the older ones. This happened to the previous speaker as well. His topic was the tribimaximal mixing matrices, so there were 25x3 = 75 minutes of speakers on pretty much the same subject of neutrino physics.

I met Dr. Koide and obtained his photograph. He obtained mine. I will eventually get this stuff blogged, I hope tonight.

After the talk, I had one man come up to me with the question, "but we know that spinors change state under rotation because we can make them interfere". Well, of course the density operator theory gives identical results as the spinor theory (the Dirac equation is the same in each). Where they differ is that the operator theory does not allow you to split the initial state away from the final state. So long as you keep them together, rotating the initial state causes you to automatically rotate the final state and the two -1 factors cancel.

It is subtle little things like this that reinforce the supremacy of the usual way of looking at things. Physics is very tightly woven together and you can't change the interpretation of the state from vector to operator without having to reinterpret a lot of other things.

I was less nervous than I usually am at these things, maybe repetition does help. And 25 minutes was about the right length of time. Maybe it was good that I didn't bring in my new notes.

Ooooops! I brought along a clock to keep track of time and now I realize that I forgot it.

Enjoyed the koans
http://deoxy.org/koan/29

Basically, my lecture was on the sound of one spinor clapping.

Carl

 

[CarlB]

I saw some interesting lectures from the experimentalists on neutrino oscillation yesterday. The neutrino oscillation experiments are what provide the experimental measurements of the differences of masses of neutrinos and this forms the foundation of the talk I gave.

One of the lectures was on a diamond substrate for charged particle detection near the neutrino source. muon neutrinos are made by the circuituous process of colliding protons with a target to get muons, cleaning up the muon beam and directing it down a long tunnel where some of them decay, and then absorbing all the resulting strongly or electromagnetically interacting trash at a beam dump. The neutrinos continue on for many miles.

The reason for using a vapor deposited diamond surface was for its resistance to radiation near where the neutrinos are created. From what I can understand, they fabricated 4 samples and ended up with a range of "warm up times" that differed from a few seconds to a few minutes. If I saw that level of variability in a key parameter for a process that I was thinking of bringing into production I would be afraid. Very afraid. Maybe the warm up time could drift to months, when in actual production, maybe not. But they seemed relatively unconcerned. I wonder what the process engineers have to say.

There was another lecture that mentioned the beam geometry for some off axis neutrino studies. Off axis reduces the beam intensity but makes for a tighter energy spectrum. The speaker made the comment that this idea was so obvious that "even a string theorist thought of it". The audience laughed, and the author continued, "no, it really happened". I guess theorists, especially string theorists don't have a good reputation for being tightly coupled to the exigencies of experimental reality.

I attended some lectures on the search for very high energy cosmic rays down in South America and Brazil. I think that these are important because new physics is more likely to appear in the cosmic rays where God creates the particles, than on Earth where only Man makes them. There are some interesting correlations between the experimental apparatus and the discrepant observations of these things. These are things that are very natural to talk about with the experimentalists because they understand the limitations of electronics. But more on that later, time for more plenary lecture.

Carl

 

[CarlB]

The weather in Hawaii has taken a turn for the wet. The morning paper announced that floods have now overtaken a land just recovered from the earthquake of a few weeks ago.

This has probably improved attendance at some of the plenary lectures, but I decided that I'd taken as much sitting quietly as I am capable and came out in the main room to blog. This is where the poster session was held, more about that later.

There is a pair of escalators here. Nominally designated "up" and "down", the "up" elevator has been out of repair for some time. I say "some time" because as far as I can recall it has been out of service for the whole conference. Maybe it never worked at all.

Anyway, in a display of Hawaiian efficiency, the up elevator has been partially dismantled. I have photographed it. I would have liked to have shown it with workers working on it, but this has proved impossible as they are nowhere to be seen.

One has to go up one story from the foyer to reach this room, and without the up escalator this has involved going outside to the beautiful wide staircase that everyone with a camera has photographed.

With the present heavy rain, this has become somewhat unpleasant. Yesterday it was raining a little, and when I arrived in the morning, instead of going outside to get wet, I decided to go up the down escalator.

In addition to being fat, fifty and short, I am also carrying a heavy laptop and a day pack filled with books. This made for an exciting dash up the long escalator. I reached the top swearing and probably sweating more than I would have been watered outside, but triumphant. One of the features of growing old is imagining that you are still as smart and quick as you were when you were 24.

At the moment, there has been an interesting time reversal symmetry applied to the remaining operational escalator. It is now running in the up direction. THIS leads to a problem in the terminology. Is the old down escalator now the up escalator? Ignoring that issue, there are a few further observations.

Gravity breaks the high energy symmetry between up and down and splits the states. Consequently, I expect that it will be easier to run down the up running escalator than it was to run up the down running escalator, particularly in the low energy regime that old fat people are limited to. However, I do not intend on testing this because when I performed the feat the other way, I noticed that there is a nasty grid at the point where the escalator stairs are created and annihilated. I observed that in traversing these objects in the incorrect direction, there was a distinct non zero amplitude for me getting my body parts stuck in the mechanism. I believe that this amplitude would be identical for the reversed direction so I will instead search for alternative methods of getting downstairs.

Carl

 

[CarlB]

I attended the poster session and wine and cheese last night. I had to leave early because I had run out of clean clothes and needed to get to the laundromat in my inexpensive but colorful hotel.

There were not very many posters. Some of the posters had topics on neutrinos of higher quality than my own and I thought it was surprising that they weren't giving talks. One of the more obscure posters was accompanied by a Japanese man with a stick figure of what I recall as a cube truncated by an octahedron with center of symmetry. I recognized this as the symmetry of the preon model I work with and so I had a short talk with him. His poster comes with an abstract, but it was not listed in the program, so here it is:

A Model of Elementary Domain appearing in the deepest space of the Standard Model
Yoshino Takahiko, 21 Soken Science & Technology Institute (Hong Kong)
This is an attempt in the Yukawa tradition to solve the remaining problems of particle physics. Considered here are some spatial structures behind the local symmetries as explained by the Standard Model. In this study I discovered anti-space, hidden states, and "triplet" on a point of local space. This triplet occurs either on a two dimensional plane surface, or in a three dimensional space. All spatial points are arranged on triangular lattices, and they can also be on square lattice points. Assembling these lattices, I build a model of "Elementary Domain" (named by Yukawa) which shows the formation of different elementary particles such as electrons and meson.

I couldn't find references in the literature for the above. In short, he says that three generations follow from three particles making up the leptons. I will look again for better references later, till then, here is a link to a Google search for the name:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q="Yoshino+Takahiko"

While at the meeting, I overheard a few physicists talking about the amateurs who show up at these things. They were not envying the ability of the amateurs, but did think that giving talks was important for the amateurs who really do believe the crap they write.

On the other hand, the sociologists say that the definition of a community is a group of people who believe the same horse-hockey. This explains why societies can be blind to very obvious facts of life that are clear to other societies. And of course physicists are a community too.

Since physicists are a community, I have scrubbed the beliefs from my early work that physicists find most repulsive. That is not because I have been convinced that the fashionable belief is the truth, but because I have observed that the unfashionable beliefs are ignored and so cannot be tested for truth. This is where most amateurs stray.

I also saw a fascinating poster by Kazumi Fukuma which I thought I would mention.

Carl

 

[Kea]

A Model of Elementary Domain appearing in the deepest space of the Standard Model
All spatial points are arranged on triangular lattices, and they can also be on square lattice points.

Yes, sounds interesting. You know, truncations of cubes by hyperplanes is what operad polytopes are all about...It would be good if you could get a reference for this.

That is not because I have been convinced that the fashionable belief is the truth, but because I have observed that the unfashionable beliefs are ignored and so cannot be tested for truth.

Unfortunately, in times such as these one must be prepared to yell out sacrilege at the top of one's lungs and hope at least one person (in a position to do something about it) is listening.

 

[CarlB]

The conference is over. I'm about to check out of the hotel and take a cab over to the airport.

I made a tactical error Thursday and again Friday (yesterday). I forgot to apply the baby powder. The result was that when I walked out to have an inexpensive lunch on Friday (expensive ones being available in the hotel), I was in such pain that I decided to leave off the last afternoon of the conference and so I continued walking back to the hotel.

When I got back, I took a shower, and being extremely hungry, I powdered myself, went downstairs, and walked to the McDonalds. Since I still wasn't figuring on seeing the tail end plenary lectures, I didn't bring my computer or backpack. The result of being freshly fed, bathed and powdered, and not carrying my heavy accouterments, was that I had a new burst of energy and walked on to the Waikiki Sheraton to attend the last afternoon lectures.

All the lectures were good, but the final lecture of the day stood out as an example of the art:
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/indico/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=760&sessionId=23&confId=3

It was by Francis Halzen, whose lucky students learn at the University of Wisconsin:
http://icecube.wisc.edu/~halzen/webpages/aboutme.htm

He began with Fermi's paper of 1934 on the weak interactions that presaged the mass of the W. From there he went to discussing the Higgs, which he called, with reason, "the ugly particle", and discussed various ways its mass might be calculated. But he made it clear that it required a certain amount of fine tuning.

The other fine tuning problems he discussed were baryogenesis, the cosmic coincidence (inflation), and the cancellation of all but 1/10^10 of matter against antimatter.

He discussed several subjects close to my heart. He talked about heavenly accelerators that may solve earthly problems, the "cosmic haze". Eventually I realized that it was the cosmic rays that were being discussed, but I better like the poetry of the words I heard.

He said that Lorentz invariance will likely be violated at very high speeds, and those very high speeds are likely to be detectable by neutrinos. Since I don't believe in Lorentz invariance as a fundamental principle of physics (rather than an approximation that can be derived from the geometry), this was very heartening.

So he talked about a lot of neutrino detectors, particularly Antares. The pilot project for Antares was DUMAND, and it turns out that yours truly designed the ECL gate array that measured the PMT outputs from that experiment. To hear the name again after so many years was nice.

I have notes from the other talks and various things, but I'm exhausted and even if I were not, I could still use the excuse that I need to get ready to go. I understand that the first snow of the season shut the pass east of Seattle this week. That important freeway goes on through the corn and barley growing regions of central Washington (where Liquafaction's ethanol plant is located), through the volcanic badlands of eastern Washington, then the mountains of Idaho, Montana, and eventually on to Chicago and points east.

Carl

 

[Kea]

CarlB

Thanks a lot for the blogging effort ... I almost feel like I was there!

 

[CarlB]

After I blogged that last comment, I went downstairs, checked out of the inexpensive ($50 per night) and colorful hotel (which has permanent residents who get their mail downstairs, along with the sort of things that would lead me to suspect that this would be a reasonable place to look for illegal drugs to purchase if that were desired), I mentioned to the clerk that I had run out of cash and would be paying for my ride back to the airport by credit card. He responded that taxicabs in Honolulu do not accept credit cards!

I asked him where there was a nearby bank that was open on a Saturday, and he pointed me towards a nearby bank that turned out to be closed. From around here I got very useful direction to how to walk out of Waikiki to the residential district near Diamond Head where there was a Bank of Hawaii that was open on Saturday.

By the time I got to the Bank of Hawaii and back, I was drenched in sweat. And Honolulu airport requires its passengers to walk remarkably long distances for such a small island. But I made it back to Seattle which is cold, raining and very comfortable to me.

My buddy's plan on selling our ethanol factory appears to be falling apart due to the purchasing company having made a financial mistake so severe that it will likely destroy them. I hate to admit it, but I think this is good news because I thought that the purchasing company was so incompetent as to be dangerous to sell to. So I need to spend some time helping look for a buyer for a plant that makes about 48 million liters of 100% pure ethanol per year. Just think of the party you can have with just one week of production, about a million liters.

Meanwhile, I thought of a way of translating my density operator formalism result for the leptons into a guess on the symmetry of the mass terms in the usual field theory and will write this up when I can find the time. Basically, one guesses that instead of having Dirac mass terms like m\bar{\nu}_L\nu_R+m\bar{\nu}_R\nu_L, one guesses that there is a sterile neutrino inserted in the sequence, and one gets instead something like:

m\bar{\nu}_L\nu_R + m\bar{s}_L\nu_L + m\bar{s}_Ls_R +<br /> m\bar{\nu}_Rs_L

where "s" is a sterile neutrino.

Assuming I didn't reverse L and R, the above is experimentally indistinguishable from the usual Dirac mass because experiments always produce neutrinos with 99.9999% of their energy in kinetic form rather than mass form. So if you lose a few neutrinos to sterility by the above process, you will never see it experimentally.

Then one asks, what is the effective mass of the above neutrino? Feynman has a calculation which gives mass to a massless propagator (1/p) by assuming that a massive propagator is made from any number of massless propagators that interact with amplitudes m. This set of trivial Feynman diagrams can be easily summed:

\begin{array}{l}<br /> 1/p + (1/p)m(1/p) + (1/p)m(1/p)m(1/p) + ...\\<br /> =(1/p)(1 + m/p + (m/p)^2 + ...)\\<br /> = (1/p)(1-m/p)^{-1}\\<br /> =p/(p-m)\end{array}

When you apply the same sort of resumming to the modified neutrino mass, my intuition says that you're going to pull a factor of m^2 out instead of m. But to get this to work, you have to assume to assume that you are operating in a sufficiently complicated algebra that you don't have the intermediate terms (i.e. the sterile neutrinos) interfere with the usual ones.

If you are a little more careful in your Feynman diagrams, you will distinguish between left and right propagators, and in doing the above resummation you will derive the massive Dirac propagator from the massless ones. That is, instead of doing one summation, you will have four to make, that is, the initial state either L or R, and the final state either L or R. These four summations you can then glue back together to obtain the massive Dirac propagator derived from the massless one. I highly recommend this as an exercise.

This means that you have to be a little careful in your summing the terms. You can't add apples to oranges and expect them to add, but you must instead keep separate totals for the apples and oranges. When you do this with the sterile neutrinos included you will end up with m^4 in the denominators instead of m^2. Now think of 11 sterile neutrinos instead of just 1. You end up with m^{24} in your denominator instead of m^2. This is exactly the sort of thing you need to get a 3^{24} difference in magnitude between the neutrino and charged lepton masses.

So you can postulate a mass interaction which is the same for charged and neutral leptons despite their very large disparity in mass. And of course, when you include the Koide formula for inter generational mass differences, you can also expect that there will be that factor of pi/12 that pops out.

Making this sort of change will increase the number of neutrinos by a factor of 12. Since the heaviest neutrino is around 0.05 eV (assuming normal hierarchy and all that), this means that the total of the neutrino masses is not around 0.05 eV, but is about 12 times that. The interesting thing about this, is that it brings the total mass of neutrinos very close to the limit (i.e. 0.7eV) that the cosmologists have placed on them.

Carl

 

[CarlB]

An update on my talk in Hawaii last October. The formula for the neutrino masses (which was first discussed here on Physics Forums) now has 4 journal citations:

Neutrino Mass and New Physics;
R. N. Mohapatra, A. Y. Smirnov; Department of Physics, University of Maryland, Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Institute for Nuclear Research RAS;
Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science, 56 (2006) 569-628
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0603118v2

Heuristic Development of a Dirac-Goldhaber Model for Lepton and Quark Structure;
Gerald Rosen, Drexel University;
Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007) 283-288
http://www.worldscinet.com/mpla/22/2204/S0217732307022621.html

Tribimaximal Neutrino Mixing and a Relation Between Neutrino and Charged Lepton-Mass Spectra;
Yoshio Koide, University of Shizuoka;
to be published in J. Phys. G (2007).
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0605074

S_3 Symmetry and Neutrino Masses and Mixings;
Yoshio Koide, University of Shizuoka;
to be published in Euro. Phys. J C (2007).
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0612058

I declared a blog party and discussed the citations here:
http://carlbrannen.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/to-help-miss-cite-reb-eretics-simple-hot/

In retrospect, I think the reason this got notice was because it put Koide's formula into eigenvector / eigenvalue form. Maybe this makes it easier to fit into other ideas, or maybe it just makes it more attractive.

The problem for the standard model is that masses are supposed to arise from renormalization group effects and these aren't very compatible with Koide's formula, in the usual form or the eigenvalue form. Rewriting his formula in eigenvalue form suggests that the usual methods of quantum mechanics should also work for the pole masses. I think that a natural leap of logic is to suppose that there should be a way of writing quantum mechanics as a perturbation series around bound states instead of a perturbation series around free states. Then eigenvalue problems naturally arise.

Carl

 

[arivero]

Heuristic Development of a Dirac-Goldhaber Model for Lepton and Quark Structure;
Gerald Rosen, Drexel University;
Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007) 283-288
http://www.worldscinet.com/mpla/22/2204/S0217732307022621.html

Interesting guy, I failed to notice his work when compiling the "long thread".

The problem for the standard model is that masses are supposed to arise from renormalization group effects and these aren't very compatible with Koide's formula, in the usual form or the eigenvalue form.

Indeed the problem is that if the masses are going to meet in a single multiplet in the GUT scale, it must be possible to predict them from its equality in such multiplet. The jargon says that any low energy formula must be "protected by a symmetry".

Of course this is not true if the masses at GUT are zero (or infinite).