I came back from Washington D.C. a couple of days ago. I was attending the APS “April” Meeting (yes it took place on February), which was held at the Marriot Wardman Park hotel. It was fun, and I got to give a quick presentation about the analysis that I was working on earlier last year, in preparation for physics analysis at CMS. It was based on simulation and was about exploring electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) scenarios beyond the Standard Model. In particular, “Higgsless” scenarios like Technicolor models or the Minimal Higgsless Model.
It was scheduled that professor Peter Higgs (one of the proponents of the Standard Model EWSB mechanism) would recieve the prestigious Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics along with many other great theorists that were involved in developing such formalism. I was really looking forward to see professor Higgs giving one of the acceptance talks, but unfortunately he did not make it to the APS meeting on Monday: it was a Higgsless APS meeting!!! As Higgsless as the models we are trying to study, isn’t that neat??
There are many physical and even philosophical reasons (well, let me say more like aesthetic reasons) for which many of us believe that we will not find the “Higgs” particle per se, i.e., not as a fundamental scalar particle but maybe as composite or none at all (although something must be there). One of these reasons is, for example, that we have never seen a fundamental scalar particle in nature before. I dislike the idea of the Higgs boson being a special component, why would that be? …. Well, I guess we are at the brink of finding out… stay tuned as the LHC will resume very soon!!!!
Edgar Carrera (Boston University)
