Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge explain why our Universe might have more than just one Higgs boson, and what they should be called.
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Any Daniel, I've been wondering, how do you keep track of all the particles there are?
What do you mean?
Well, you got the Bosons and the Fermions, and the Massons, and the Hadrons and the Patreons and the Gluons. It's too many.
I don't know. If you spend enough time with them, you just kind of get to know them.
I mean like they have personalities.
Yeah, they're all unique. They have different colors or flavors or spins.
I guess my favorite one is the Higgs boson.
Why you like the flavor of the Higgs boson?
I think there's only one Higgs boson.
That we have found so far.
Dum dum dum.
Hi.
I am Horeham made cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm bold a universe with just one Higgs Boson.
Are you bored in general or is it really related to particles?
Daniel, I just want more, more and more, more particles, more discoveries, more everything, more clues as to the nature of the universe. And we've had this one Higgs boson for like almost ten years now, We're ready for another one.
Don't you know They say that less is more. You get to learn to do more. And what do you have?
That's basically a project of particle physics is boil all the particles down to one fundamental particle. But to do that, we got to see all of them, so we got to see them more and then make them less man.
Physicists are so greedy. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We try to make more out of the unknowns of the universe, explain all of them to you, the things we do and do not understand about how stars form, why planets whiz around them, whether there is alien life out there, how the universe began, whether you can teleport, is there another you out there? All the crazy ideas that people have, all the questions that people ask. We try to tackle all of them and explain them to you.
Yeah, because there are a lot of questions out there in the universe for us to explore and to try to find answers to things out there in space and also things right here in the palm of our hands. There are trillions and trillions of little particles, even just in your fingertip, and there are many questions we can ask about them.
That's right, and trillions sounds like an exaggeration, but it's actually not. It's an under exaggeration. There are bajillions, gazillions of particles all around you. Every single one of you is just a seething mass of quantum particles, frothing in and out of existence, bubbling around and creating who you are. And one of the goals of this podcast, one of the goals of particle physics, and I dare say one of the goals of science is to peel that back and understand it at its most fundamental level. What is really going on in the universe at the smallest scales.
Yeah, because it makes up everything that we are and everything around us, everything we eat, everything we touch, everything we ride around in or serve the internet on. It's all made out of particles. And there are still big questions about what those particles are or what those particles can be.
That's right. We have a list of particles that we've discovered, six quarks, six leftons, a few bosons, and the Higgs of course, but we don't know how many particles there are. We don't know if the particles we found are basically the whole picture, if it's everything, or if it's just the tip of the iceberg, if there are lots more particles waiting around the corner for us to create and explore.
Did you lose some particles, Daniel, do you think they're waiting to jump us or something? What are they waiting for? Why haven't they revealed themselves.
I don't know. Maybe they're shy, you know, or maybe they're just picky. Their agents are holding out for like brown Eminem's before they make their appearance.
I see, you need more eminems at the Large Hadron Collider. You need a green room. First of all, you don't have a green.
Room for particles, that's true.
You just have one big open loop.
We need to pamper our particles more, is what you're saying.
It's right, it's a new field particle pampering.
Particle pampering at the Large Eminem collider.
Yeah, there you go, masons and molecules. But yeah, that's the weird thing about nature. I guess in the universe is that there are sort of a lot of possible particles out there, a lot of different quantum fields, but kind of on an everyday basis, we only interact or are only made up of stuff in three fields and three kinds of particles.
Yeah, that's because the universe is mostly pretty cold. Like you can imagine, the universe has lots of different ways it can be energy can slash around between different kinds of fields, or if you like to think about particles can slash around between different kinds of particles. But these days, fourteen billion years into the life of the universe, things are pretty spread out and cold, and so everything's mostly relaxed down to the lowest mass, the lightest particles, the electrons, and the up and down quarks that make up the protons and neutrons inside of us. But as you say, that doesn't mean there aren't those other possible particles out there, and to make them, to see them, we need to recreate some of those early conditions in the universe, put a lot of energy into one spot and try to excite the universe into revealing its secrets.
Yeah, because there are all these other possible particles and we don't see them in our everyday lives, but they are sort of there, and sometimes they do kind of show up in our atmosphere, right and coming from the Sun. Sometimes these strange particles sometings do form around this.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Our colliders are not the only conditions for making these crazy particles. There are some big accelerators out there sort of astrophysically speaking, shooting particles at us and when they hit our atmosphere, those collisions can also make really big, rare, heavy particles and create these big showers which then filter on down to Earth. So yeah, these particles are being created sort of all the time whenever there's an energetic particle smashing into another one.
And so maybe one of the most famous particles I think so, besides maybe the electron maybe and the quarks, is this famous one that was discovered about eight years ago.
Yeah, I was announced in twenty twelve. It's the last major discovery of the Standard Model, and a lot of people describe it as sort of the last piece of the Standard Model. It certainly was a missing piece. We needed the Higgs boson or something like it to explain what we were seeing in the Standard Model, and we found it about ten years ago in twenty twelve, and that was very exciting. It was very interesting. But there are still, as you say, a lot of open questions.
Yeah, and it's not only famous. People think it's super important in the universe. Right. Some people even called it the God particle.
I hate that name, the God particle.
You hate God?
No, I hate the publicist that came up with the title of that book.
I think it was a physicist.
I think it was a physicists publicist. I see this book is a little dry. Can you make it a little bit more snazzy.
A little more grand maybe? But the Higgs is pretty important in the sense that it does sort of kind of hold the universe together in a way, right to give things mass, And if things didn't have mass, they wouldn't feel gravity, and without that, things would just kind of float around and not do anything.
It would be a very different universe if particles didn't have mass.
Absolutely, And you can't say the same thing about like the muon, right, how different would the universe be without the muon?
Oh? Man, the poor muon. The Muon's agent is going to be in here mad any second now.
Thanks gonna be like, we need a better publication.
But you're right, we don't actually need the muon. In fact, when we discover the muon, people were a little annoyed and somebody said, like, who ordered that? We got a pretty good system over here. We don't need the muon. One of the deepest questions in physics is why do we have particles like the muon and the towel that are just copies of the electron. So you're right, some particles seem to have cousins or copies. Other ones don't yet.
Right, right, And so the Higgs is pretty important because it does give particles mass.
It does give particles mass, and so it's really important.
I guess there are still big questions about the Higgs. I mean, we sort of found one, but we don't know all there is to know about the Higgs boson.
That's right, there are still lots of fascinating mysteries.
Yeah, and so today on the program, we'll be asking the question how many different Higgs bosons are there? Wait, I mean like there are more than one Higgs boson. It's plural Higgs bosons.
I know, the Higgs might not be so special after all.
Wait, but if it has a twin, it is kind of special.
Well, who knows. We don't know how many higgs there are. There might just be one Higgs boson. There might be five Higgs bosons, there might be twenty seven Higgs bosons. As usual, we don't know if we are looking at the entire ice cube or just the tip of the iceberg.
Are you talking about whether there is more than one copy of it, or whether there's more than one type of higgs boson.
More than one different kind of higgs bosons, the way there are more than one kind of quark, or there are more than one kind of electron. Right, the mwon and the tow are not just other electrons. There are different kind of particles.
You mean, like you would need different names even then, right, like the tall higgs boson, the blonde higgs boson, the funny higgs boson. Can I be on the naming committee?
Or we could just keep using names of gods. You could have the Zeus particle and the Hera particle.
The demigod particle.
There you go, Yes, you could be on the naming committe. In fact, I'm pretty sure you are. The naming committee.
Oh good, does it have any actual power?
I don't know. Give it a powerful name. Call it the powerful Naming Committee.
There you go, Yeah, the naming committee. There you go, the il just the name of the committee.
The committee. There you go.
Well, this is a big question, and now I guess in particle physics is how many different kinds of higgs bosons there are? Which is pretty interesting. And so, as usually we were wondering how many people out there were even aware that there could be different kinds of Higgs bosons out there. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet to ask how many different Higgs bosons are there?
And so, if you would like to be asked tough questions about particle physics by a particle physicist without the opportunity to do any research whatsoever, that sounds fun to you, then right to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Here's what people had to say. Honestly, I thought there was one, so one.
I think it's just one, but I don't think I would be surprised.
Do you know if there anymore?
Since it is the god particle, we never know what kind of myteries and surprises it might be holding.
I thought there was only one, but given that you asked this question, I guess there's more.
This feels a little bit of like a trick question, because as far as I know, there's only one Higgs boson. But since there are the other ones are all coming paris like six quarks or six leptos, I'd say, no, I'm going to stick to one.
I guess there's one Higgs Boson. It goes, it goes forward and backwards in time, and there's only one Higgs Boson. People thought there was only one electron that was responsible for the whole universe, you know, But it's not even an electron. It's a Higgs Boson that just builds everything.
I thought there was only one Higgs Boston. Isn't that the one that gives mass to particles? But after listening to your show long enough, there's probably a negative and a positive, and a left handed and a right handed, and one that only appears on Fridays.
But I thought there was only one.
I think there's only one Higgs Boson because there's only one Peter Higgs.
Imagine being at Soon having a big party after discovering Higgs Boson, and then Daniel in the Darkwood comes by and tells, sorry, not so far, as there are actually fifteen more Higgs Bosons to discover.
In the standard model, there's like six quarks and like six leptons, so I'm assuming it'd probably be about the same, maybe three higgs and like three anti higgs or something similar.
All Right, everyone seems surprised that there could be more than one.
I know, That's why I was hoping we could do this episode to blow everyone's minds and open it up a little bit to the entire world of possibilities about Higgs bosons.
Well, some people seem to sort of relate it to some of the other versions of other particles. Like someone said, maybe there are anti Higgs bosons.
Yes, very clever. That's exactly the kind of thinking that we need to be doing. We see these patterns in the other particles that have pairs, right, the electron and the neutrino, or a pair the up and the down, or a pair the electron and the anti electron are another kind of pair. Why doesn't the Higgs have other particles it pairs with? Or does it?
Right?
Dun, dun, dun.
That's the suspense music right there. Maybe there are many different kinds of Higgs bosons. Would it be then, Higgs's Higgs' bosons? What would be the correct grammatical plural?
I think it's like attorney's general, So it's higgs.
Boson, Higgs Higgs's or higgs with the apostrophe.
I don't know what in the field we say Higgs'. We don't say Higgs' boson. We say, higgses or Higgs bosons.
Oh, I see you're inconsistent. That's unusual.
I'll take that. I'll take that on the chin.
Yeah, I wouldn't hit you anywhere else. Well, let's take a step back here for maybe people who are not familiar with what even the Higgs boson is. So step us through what is the Higgs boson in the first place?
Right, So, the Higgs boson is a particle, and as usual, a particle is really just evidence of the existence of a quantum field. Like the electron exists. It's a particle, but that particle really is just like the electron field getting excited in a little spot. You inject some energy into the electron field and you get an electron. So we think of fields as filling space, and so the Higgs boson is evidence that there exists this Higgs field, this thing where if you inject energy into it, a little Higgs boson pops out.
I see, right, Like the whole universe is filled with these fields.
Yeah, every part of space has all of the fields. Every particle that can exist, every part of space has all those fields all on top of each other. And when a particle exists at that point in space. What we really mean is one of those fields or several of them have some energy in them. And so we talk about the Higgs boson a lot, but really the interesting thing is the Higgs field, because it's the Higgs field that does cool and fascinating stuff like giving mass to other particles.
Right, that's the big headline for the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. Then, so how does it give mass to particles?
It gives mass to those particles by interacting with them. You have all these different fields sort of stacked on top of each other in space, but they don't ignore each other. They couple with each other, They interact with each other. They slosh energy back and forth and interfere with each other in specific ways. And the Higgs field is different from all of the other fields and interacts with particles in a very different way. And it interacts with those particles in just the right way so that they move through space as if they had inertia. Right, So the particles we think without the Higgs boson would have no mass. It would be massless particles. The electron would be massless, just like the photon. But because it interacts with the Higgs field, It changes the way it moves through space. And one way to think about that is, oh, it's moving through space interacting with the Higgs field. Another totally mathematically equivalent way to think about it is, it's moving through space and it has some mass, it has some inertia.
Is it more accurate than to say that the Higgs field gives particles inertia not necessarily mass.
Yes, because when we talk about mass, it's like, what do you really mean by mass? Do we mean the thing that creates gravity or do we mean the property of objects to resist a change in their velocity? Right, something in motion stays in motion, something at rest stays at rest. That's really inertia we're talking about. So sometimes we call that inertial mass.
And so the Higgs field is responsible for inertial mass, like, it's not responsible for giving things gravity.
Exactly, it's not responsible for giving things gravity. You can have inertial mass of a particle if it's out there in the middle of space, not interacting with anything else, with no gravity at all. And so the Higgs has really nothing to do with gravity.
Right, So the reason I can't get up in the morning is because of the Higgs field. Right, the reason I can't run faster is because of the Higgs field, but the reason I can't jump higher is something totally different.
That's right. You can always find somebody to blame, I'm sure. But also the Higgs field is the reason you're around, so it gets some credit.
As well, all right, So then that's how it's important. It gives things inertial mass, and I guess without inertial mass, things would be just kind of crazy, right, things would just be flying around at the speed of light all the time.
Yeah, things would definitely be very different. It's possible to have a universe without inertial mass, like the Higgs field gives things mass because it's sort of stuck at this weird value for a reason we don't understand. And if that value collapse down to zero, particles wouldn't have mass anymore. And we talked about this in a whole episode about could the Higgs field destroy the universe? And it's not like it would destroy the universe, but it would make for a very very different universe. If the electron had no mass and the up and the down quarks had no mass, the laws of physics and chemistry and biology would just be totally different. So the reason the universe is the way it is is because the Higgs field exists and has a certain amount of energy sort of built into it, giving mass to all these particles.
Right, giving all the particles inertia, and so without inertia, thinks, which is zip around at top speed basically.
Right, Yeah, electrons would move at the speed of light exactly.
Yeah, and quarts to everything, right, everything, yeah, all of it all right, And so it also links to the big forces, the Higgs field.
That's right. The reason that we think the Higgs exists came out of the attempt to combine electromagnetism, which is the forceeed responsible for light and for magnets and for lightning and all that kind of stuff, with this other weird little force, the weak nuclear force that usually you think about in terms of like radioactive decay and this kind of stuff, but it's actually very closely connected to electromagnetism. People realize that if you stuck these two things together, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, you made a single, larger concept, which they called electroweak, which had some really nice mathematical properties. So that suggested that electromagnetism and the weak force are not totally separate ideas. They're really just sort of two sides of the same coin, and it made more sense to think about them together. But when people tried to do that, they ran into a problem. They're like, hold on a second, there's some big differences between electromagnetism and the weak force. For example, the photon doesn't have any mass, but the particles that convey the weak force, the w's and the z are really heavy. So how could you possibly have these two forces be linked together? And the Higgs is the answer to that puzzle. The Higgs came out of that puzzle. People hypothesized, maybe we need a particle like the Higgs to answer that puzzle.
Yeah, that's how you sort of thought or knew that it was going to be there, and then in twenty twelve they actually found it. You built this giant collider and then you hit particles together and out came the Higgs.
Yeah, it's a really cool sort of triumph of theoretical physics. They were just looking at these patterns of the particles and noticing, wow, you could fit these particles together into a larger pattern. But then you'd need this one other piece for it to really click together and make And then we went out and looked for it, and took about fifty years before we were able to create the conditions necessary to have a Higgs Boson that we could see and study and understand. But yeah, then we found it's real. It's actually part of the universe.
Yeah, you can see it like as a blip on graphs and stuff like, it's there. It's part of reality for sure.
It's part of reality for sure.
And so you found one. And so the big question is could there be more? Could there be more than one kind of Higgs Boson? So let's get into why we think we need more Higgs Bosons and how will we ever find them? But first let's take a quick break.
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All Right, we're talking about the higgs bosonses the most plural of the higgs bosons. I know you're saying there could be more than one, and why do we think there could be more than one?
We think there might be more than one Higgs boson because we get a clue when we look at the weak nuclear force. So the Higgs boson is the thing that connects the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism, right, which means is sort of part of the weak nuclear force. It talks to the weak nuclear force, and the weak force has these really interesting structures like we were talking about before, It tends to pair particles together into these things we call doublets. For example, the upcork and the down cork are connected together by the weak nuclear force. Like when a w boson decays, it decays into that pair an up and a down or decays to an electron and a neutrino, sort of the same way you think about like a particle and an antiparticle being paired. Because a photon can decay to a particle and an antiparticle, the same way a W can decay into like an up and a down. So this is one doublet. For example, we call these particles they pair them together, we call them a doublet. But we have lots of these doublets in the weak force, and so very simply we just ask, like, maybe we have more than one Higgs doublet. Maybe there are more copies, just like there are copies of the electron, and there are copies of the quarks.
I see just from being associated with the weak force, you think that, hey, maybe the Higgs also has a twin out there, because most things that feel the weak force or interact with the week fource have a twin.
Yeah, and they have more than one twin, right. The electron has two twins. There's the muon and there's the towel. The upcork has two twins also, the charm and the top. And it's intriguing that both of those have exactly two twins, right, And so then we wonder, like, why is Higgs different? Maybe it's the same. One of the games of particle physics is looking for patterns for symmetries, for connections and drawing inspiration from one part and applying it to another and asking like, why is this different? Maybe it's not.
I guess not all particles have these twins. Some particles don't have twins. But you're saying the ones that feel the weak force or interact with the weak force do.
Well, all the particles interact with the weak force. There's no particle out there that doesn't interact with the weak force, except maybe the gluon.
I guess what about I guess like the photon doesn't, does it?
The photon does interact with the weak force. Yeah, is, for example, can decay into a pair of W bosons. Right, the photon can turn into a W plus and a W minus. So the weak force is super duper weak. But it's fascinating because it basically touches everything.
But the photons don't have a twin, But we think maybe the Higgs might have a twin.
Yeah, you're right. Photons don't have a twin as far as we know, and we don't know if there are other kinds of particles out there, and so the Higgs might have a twin. And we have some hints from theoretical physics that suggests that some other problems might be solved if there were more Higgs bosons.
Interesting, so you're saying that god particle might have a god twin.
Yeah, there might be more gods, right, Particle physics might be polytheistic after all.
All right, Well, maybe step us through. What are some of the main reasons why we think that the Higgs boson could have these twins?
All right? So my first and favorite reason is just like why not? You know, and I guess we said this already, but I just want to underscore it, Like, we just don't really know what's out there, and particle physics is about exploration, right, We are going out there, we are looking for surprises. You never know when you turn on a collider what's going to pop out, and so we've got to keep an open mind. And when you find one of something, there might always be other copies. And so it seems to me like a great idea to sort of symmetrize the standard model and add these other copies of the Higgs boson in the same way. But we also have extensions of the standard model, other problems in the standard model that we're trying to solve by thinking about what other new particles might be out there. One of them is, for example, supersymmetry. This is the one that looks at the fermions in the Standard Model, the matter particles and the bosons, the force particles, and wonders like, why do we have two different kinds of particles? We have these matter particles and these force particles. Why two different kinds? And it suggests like, well, maybe there's some symmetry there. Maybe for every force particle there's some matter particle we haven't found yet that's like a partner of it. And for every matter particle, there's some force particle we haven't found yet that's sort of the partner of it. So it says like maybe there's this whole copy of the Standard Model, all these other particles out there that are too heavy for us to have seen yet but might still exist. So this is a very popular idea in particle physics. It's called supersymmetry, and this is an extension of the Standard Model that would solve a bunch of theoretical problems. And if you have supersymmetry, then you definitely need to have have more Higgs bosons.
I see, like, maybe there's a super symmetric version of the Higgs out there, Yes, exactly, why not?
Why not? And the super fun thing is that the super symmetric versions of these particles take the original name and add a little modification. So, for example, if you take a boson and you make a super symmetric fermion, you add eno to the end. So a Higgs boson in the standard model has a Higgs zino in supersymmetry. And so we're talking about Higgs and higgszino's all the time.
That's the most exciting part for you is this story that there's something called a higg zino.
Yeah, these are fun words to say. You know, you've got to find pleasure in the daily craft sometimes, and so zeno and we know, and higgsino and fotino. These are fun words to say.
They also sound like cheb boyard of flavors. Why not? I think you should make that the title of your next physics proposal, Daniel, why not give me ten million dollars? Why? Why not?
Wellether, I might as well ask for ten billion, you know, because hey, why why not?
Yeah? Why not? It should be the title of our next book? Why not?
And the key thing in supersymmetry is that we are creating other particles, but also other kinds of particles. This is like another way to reflect our particles. We see this all over the place in particle physics that particles have these reflections, Like the electron has this reflection in its antiparticle, It has reflection in the muon and in the tau. It has a reflection in the electron neutrino, and so this is like another direction in which you can reflect the electron. The electron has this reflection now in the supersymmetric version of it the selectron, but because the selectron is different from the electron, it needs a different kind of Higgs boson.
Yeah, there's all these different ways to like find symmetries in physics and particle physics to reflect particles, and so you're saying one of them is this supersymmetry. There are others ways though, right.
Yeah, there's lots of ways to look for these symmetries, especially when we see things that we don't understand. And sometimes we see something some behavior between the particles and it looks like they're obeying a rule, but we don't know what that rule is or why that rule exists. For example, something we see sometimes in particle physics is violation of some symmetries, like the weak force violates this symmetry we call parity, which says basically, if you invert the whole universe into a mirror, do the laws of physics change? And the weak force violates that, which is really strange. But this kind of violation doesn't appear in other parts of the standard model, Specifically, when you're talking about quarks, you don't get these kinds of violations, And so we don't understand why why do you see sometimes these violations in the leptons but not in the quarks, where these things seem really similar and the rules seem really similar. Why is it broken here and not there? And so people invented other particles like the axion to try to protect these symmetries, to say, well, this maybe explains why it happens over here in the leptons but not in the quarks. And if you want more details about the axion, we have a whole podcast episode about this crazy particle named after a detergent at.
Least it's a clean name. No, how would Higgs explain the ixion? Like how would new kinds of Higgs bosons you know, resolve this axion problem.
Well, actually you need a Higgs boson in order to let the axion resolve this problem. Like, the axion is something which exists in the early universe as the sort of the universe is relaxing. Remember we think about the universe is like starting out really hot and high energy and then sort of cooling down to the universe that we have today. Well, we think that when the universe was really hot and dense, that it wasn't just like higher temperature. We think that basically there were different laws of physics, not because somebody has changed the simulation, but just because in different conditions you get different effective laws. Like the way fluid flows is different if the water is cold or if the water is frozen, right, the fluid doesn't flow. So you need sort of like different sets of laws for different conditions. And so we think that like the original set of laws sort of like cracked and broke into our set of laws in a very specific way, and the axion proten and make sure that it happens in this way to protect the quarks so they don't violate this symmetry. But for the axion to do that, there has to be a second special Higgs boson that only the axion can talk to.
Interesting like Higgs, but only for the axion.
Yeah, exactly, like an action Higgs. That's right, a fitter version of the Higgs that doesn't sit around all day eating chips and watching TV.
The movie Star twin. You know, there's always to the two twins.
The Hollywood Higgs.
Yeah, that's right, the Arnold Schwroschenegger twin, not the Danny the Vita twin.
But that's not maybe even the most interesting or compelling reason why we might need more Higgs bosons.
There's more. There's more, of course, why not?
In the end, all these Higgs bosons are trying to solve like problems we see in particle physics, and one of the deepest ones is this question of why is everything we see out there made of matter and not anti matter? Right? I'm made of matter, you're made of matter. We both matter. But when we look at particle physics, there seems to be this symmetry. It is no preference for matter or antimatter. There are electrons, but there are also positrons. Every particle has an anti particle, So why does the universe seemed to be made out of matter instead of antimatter. We're looking through the laws of physics force on preference, but we really haven't found any. And so people think, like back in the very beginning when the Big Bang happened, there was equivalent amounts of matter and antimatter made. But if that was the case, then you know, the whole universe should have basically just annihilated itself into a lot of photons. Clearly that didn't happen because you and I are here. So we're looking for like a preference to create matter over antimatter, and we haven't found one yet. So this is totally unexplained. But if you add a bunch more Higgs bosons to your theory, then you create all these ways for matter to be preferred over antimatter. You create all these processes that prefer to create matter rather than antimatter. And so it just sort of gives us a bunch more like knobs to tweak on our theory to allow us to potentially explain this matter antimatter asymmetry.
I see, it's sort of like there's stuff you can't explain, so you just make stuff up. Generally, what I'm hearing from you they hear. Is that what physicists do.
That's exactly the job description, and last time it worked, right. That's basically how we found the Higgs boson. We couldn't explain why the w's and disease were heavy and the photon was not, so we came up with the Higgs boson to explain it, and it turned out to be real. Now, you know, that's one example out of the many thousands of ideas we've had which turned out to not be real. But that's sort of the job.
I mean, you're talking to a cartoon as it's my job to make stuff up, So I'm all for using your imagination here. But yeah, so is the idea then that maybe these new undiscovered types of higgs bosons might explain this imbalance between matter and antimatter, Like maybe these mystery higgs bosons somehow let us make more matter than antimatter.
Yeah, these other higgs bosons would be free to violate CP symmetry. We talked earlier about symmetry. That's P that says, take the universe and invert it in a mirror. Do you get the same laws of physics? C means take the universe and change all the particles to anti particles. So CP means take the universe, invert it in a mirror, take all the particles, make them antiparticles. Do the same laws apply. And the reason we're talking about that is because if you have a process that violates CP symmetry, then you can create more matter than antimatter. And a bunch of these new, extra complicated, fancy Hollywood Higgs bosons are capable of doing just that, and so they can explain why in the early universe, when matter and antimatter were created equally, some of that annihilation turned back into just matter instead of antimatter. And we are here today. So if that's true, then we extra oh the Higgs boson for our existence.
You might even want to call it the God particles because it's so important.
The God's particles, right.
You know, Or would this be the anti god particle? Yeah? Technically, would you have to call this one the anti Higgs boson.
Yeah. Some of these particles have charges, right, you have charged Higgs bosons, So you could have H plus, you could have H minus, and they could be anti particles of each other, and you could have Higgs Higgs annihilation all sorts of crazy stuff. It's gonna make great.
TV action anti higgs sino bosons.
The scripts just write themselves.
All right, Well, that's pretty cool, and so let's get into how we might ever find these new types of higgs, or if we will ever, and what it all means. But first, let's take another quick break.
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Pro, Lenalvo Lanvo. All right, we're talking about different kinds of Higgs bosons. There might be not just one Higgs boson, but maybe multiple kinds of Higgs bosons, ones that explain the different symmetries we see in other particles, or maybe even explain why we're here and not anti versions of us. So, Daniel, I guess the big question is are people looking for these new higgs and how are they looking for them? And do you think we'll ever find them?
Yeah, we are definitely looking for them. As soon as we started looking for the Higgs boson. We were actually simultaneously looking for other higgs bosons as well. You know, we didn't know at the time was there one higgs boson, Was there even any higgs boson in our universe, And so we were open to lots of different ideas, and a bunch of theorists predicted that we wouldn't just find one higgs boson it once, that we would find a bunch all the same time. But we only found the one so far. That doesn't mean that there aren't more, and so we are looking for them at the Large Hadron Collider all the time, very active.
Yeah, meaning like you're looking at the collisions and you're looking for strange things that pop out or that don't match what you think you will see.
Yeah. What we do is we smash the protons together and hope that new interesting particles are created. Right, we can't control what happens when two protons smash together. Quantum mechanics decides from the list of possibilities what gets made, and if we have enough energy so that like a heavy higgs boson, a crazy new higgs boson is on the menu, then sometimes it'll be made and then we can look for. It's a distinctive pattern because we think we know what that would look like. We think, for example, that there might be a Higgs boson that has positive two electric charge Higgs plus plus, and that would decay to another particle and to other particles, and it would leave sort of a distinctive spray in our detectors. So that's the kind of thing that we are looking for.
Wait, what like the Higgs would have double positive charge.
Yeah, there will be many of these higgses. The thing is, once you start adding higgses, you very quickly get a lot more Higgs. Because you might not be aware. But in the standard model, our current theory, we actually secretly have four Higgses, not just one.
Wait what the theory already predicts four higgses.
The theory predicts four higgses, but three of them got eaten. So the W plus, the W minus, and the z boson eight three of the Higgs bosons. That's how they got their math.
What do you mean they got eaten? What does that even mean?
It means that in a universe without a Higgs field, you would not have the W plus, the W minus, and the z boson. You'd have other particles that were like pure electroweak particles, but the Higgs field is there creates four particles, and three of those combined with a W plus, the W minus, and the z to make these like weird mixtures of particles. So the W plus is not just actually a weak boson, it's a weak boson mixed in with a bunch of Higgs boson and that's why it has mass.
WHOA, wait, what does it mean for quantum fields? Togs? Like they act together, they merge into one. What does that even mean?
Yeah, it means that they act together. You know that you can have, for example, superpositions of different states, right, you can have like an electron is partially spin up and partially spin down. Well, a W plus boson is partially pure electroweak field and partially one of these Higgs boson fields. In the stand of model, you have one of these is called a Higgs doublet that actually gives you four Higgs bosons. Three of them get eaten by the W plus, the W minus, and the z, and one of them is left over. That's the one that we found. So what happens if you add a second Higgs doublet? Well, then you get four more Higgs bosons. So you can't just go up from like one Higgs boson to two. You go from four to eight, five of which would now be visible because three of them have been eaten.
Well, once you go higges, you got to go full higgs, like you get a the whole family, right, the whole family comes to the visit at the same time.
It's family style everything at the Higgs boson restaurant. And so some of these new higgses would be positively charged charged. Some of them might have plus two charges, right, Higgs plus plus And that's not something we've ever seen before, the particle with positive two electric charge.
So then are you saying that we have found other Higgs, but they're just kind of, I don't know, they're part of the other the W boson, do you know what I mean? Like we have them, they're just kind of like, you know, part of these other particles.
Yeah, exactly, that's a nice way to say it. We found this one independent Higgs bosons and it's three sort of siblings got eaten by the other one, so we know that they are there. If they weren't there, then the W and the Z would also have zero mass, and the weak force wouldn't be very weak.
Well, maybe eating is just maybe not the right way to say. It's just like it got merged or it is part of these other particles.
That's true. Is how the theoretical physicists call it. They say that these degrees of freedom got eaten by the w's and disease, and so that's the way they like to talk about it.
Locked in maybe you know what I mean, Like it didn't get digested. It's just there. But it's just not free independent.
Yeah, it's not free. It's not independent, which means it's not its own field that you can create in a collider and study.
So those aren't you might never see, but you could maybe see other kinds of independent Higgs.
Yeah, if you make another doublet, there's no more ws and z's to eat parts of them, or to absorb parts of them, or whatever word you want to use. And so all the four particles from that doublet would then be free to make new Higgs fields, and so those might be out there. There might be two Higgs doublets, meaning that there would be a total of five free Higgs bosons running around the universe, or there might be three Higgs doublets, which would give you nine Higgs bosons free to run around the universe. And we could make these at the particle collider if we had enough energy to create them and study them. That's always the key with particle colliders.
So maybe the question is not like does the Higgs boson have other versions? It does, but it's like how many free versions does it have that we might be able to see on their own exactly?
So far we've only seen the one free Higgs, but there could be other ones running around.
Well, you might have to pay for those, right, Higgs max you get upgrade, you get to pay for the it's a subscription model to get the better PREMI version.
I want the ad free Higgs please.
Yeah, we have all these physicists talking in your ear. I would pay for that for sure.
I'll see what I can do.
So it is an active thing that you guys are looking for in the particle colliders. You are like sitting through the data looking for the evidence of these other free Higgs bosons.
We are all the time. There are people devoting their phdpcs to looking for these things. And you know, one of the most popular theories is called a two Higgs doublet model, which would be adding another Higgs doublet to the theory, creating four more free Higgs bosons. And people are looking for that all the time. They're writing papers about it. People are also looking for new Higgs bosons within supersymmetry. Supersymmetry a very very active area of research. Maybe like half of the people at the Large Hadron Collider are looking for super symmetric particles because it's such an exciting theory. So far, nobody has seen anything, like there's no hint of basically any new particles past the Higgs boson we already saw.
I see. So you been searching for man almost ten years or more, but so far, no hints at all, like no small clues, nose small blips, no small you know, encouraging results, No small hints from ATLAS or from CMS, these two experiments that collide protons and look at what comes out.
But we do have some very intriguing hints from other experiments that suggest that there might be these weird new heavy particles out there which could be additional Higgs bosons. And you've probably heard about the muon G minus two experiment for example.
Yeah, we just talked about it on a previous episodes.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that the Muon G minus two experiment is great at, is saying, are there other particles out there? Are there well more specifically other fields out there in the universe, So when a muon is flying through and some of the energy from the muon slot into those other fields, does it create momentarily these other heavy particles which could be dark matter, but they could also be a new heavy Higgs boson if that heavy Higgs boson field is out there for the muon energy to slash into. Now, they can't tell when they do that experiment what it is the muon is slashing its energy into, but they do see a discrepancy as we talked about, when they look at how the muon's magnetic field wobbles, It doesn't wobble the way they expect, And one explanation for that is that there are other heavy particles out there, too heavy for the large Hadron collider to make directly, but that are influencing the way the energy from the muon sort of slides through the universe.
So you're looking for hints, little revelations that maybe there's more to particles out there, including these maybe anti higgs.
Yeah, including these anti higgs. And this is the pattern in particle physics. Before we find a particle like directly explicitly at a collider, we usually have hints from other experiments that suggest there's a new heavy particle out there. For example, before we saw the topqrk, we were pretty sure it's there because we saw results from other experiments that didn't have the energy to make the top quark but could be influenced by the top quark in loops in exactly the same way. And so now we have that with the muon g minus two experiment is suggestive that maybe there's a new particle sort of around the corner. And it's not the only one. There's this other experiment involving Penguin diagrams that we talked about on the podcast recently that comes from a different experiment at CERN that in the same way suggests there might be new heavy particles at play in how some weird b particles decay. And again we don't know what that means. It could be this, it could be that it could be just a mistake, but if it's real, it suggests that there are extra particles out there, and they could be higgsists.
All right, So if you find that, that would be a pretty big deal. But what happens if you don't find them? What could it mean?
Yeah, if we don't find them, it means we're barking up the wrong tree. And it doesn't mean that the standard model is wrong. It's just means that we don't have an answer to the big questions like why is there more matter than antimatter? Why are there three copies of the electron, Why are the quarks and the lefton so similar when our theory says that they're kind of independent. We just don't have the answer to those questions, and so it might just mean that we need to think more deeply. We need to sort of like stare at the puzzle the way you know sometimes you look at those magic eye paintings and all of a sudden, boom, something pops out at you when you're looking at a picture of a parrot. It might just be that we need to stare at the periodic table, the fundamental particles and see a new idea, see a new pattern, ask a new kind of question, and something else to look for.
Is that what you're writing your proposals as well. Give me ten billion dollars to stare at my computer screen and why not.
That's basically theoretical physics right there. Yes, but I'm an experimentalist. I say give me ten billion dollars. I'm going to go try to make these particles improve they exist, or I'm going to ignore the theorist. I'm going to go try to make some new particle we didn't expect, find something totally surprising that isn't anticipated, and it gives us a clue as to how the universe works.
And don't forget the coffee. You guys need a coffee. That's an important part of physics to right.
That's like ten percent of the budget right there.
Yeah, well that's the minions coffee.
Have you steened prices at Starbucks recently? Oh my gosh.
All right, well, I guess let's see if we find more Higgs bosons, because that would make a lot of sense in this universe with all these strange particles and strange phenomenon, and it would sort of complete our picture of the universe.
It certainly would. It would answer a lot of questions. It would give us clues as to how things are working at the deepest level, and maybe it would finally help us figure out what the next layer of reality is deeper below these quarks and leftons. What's really going on? Are they tiny strings? Are they little quantized units of space? Is it something else totally different we never imagined.
And what's the correct way to write its plural version?
And who's going to be on that community?
I'm already in too many commis Danny all right? We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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