A new measurement of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has defied expectations. "This is very much the beginning of the story and I've shown you some directions that story could go in, but I think there could be surprises that no one has even thought of," Lykken concludes in his lecture.įollow Kelly Dickerson on Twitter. "We found the Higgs boson, which was a big deal, but we're still trying to understand what it means and we're also trying to understand all the other things that go along with it
The existence of these other particles would help stabilize the universe, Lykken said. But supersymmetry is a theory that suggests every particle also has a supersymmetric partner particle. The other is the idea of " supersymmetry." In the Standard Model, every particle has a partner, or its own anti-particle. Discovering how dark matter interacts with the rest of the universe could reveal properties and rules physicists don't know about yet. Lykken said one possibility is the existence of invisible dark matter that physicists believe makes up about 27 percent of the universe. If the calculation is wrong, it must come from a fundamental part of physics that scientists have not discovered yet.
"We're sort of right on the edge where the universe can last for a long time, but eventually it should go 'boom.' There's no principle that we know of that would put us right on the edge."Įither all of space-time exists on this razor's edge between a stable and unstable universe, or the calculation is wrong, Lykken said. "More interesting to us as physicists is when you do this calculation using the standard physics we know about, it turns out we're right on the edge between a stable universe and an unstable universe," Lykken said. The expansion would be unstoppable and would wipe out everything in the existing universe, Lykken said. Even if the Higgs field inside the bubble were slightly stronger than it is now, it could shrink atoms, disintegrate atomic nuclei, and make it so that hydrogen would be the only element that could exist in the universe, Giudice explained in his TED talk.īut using a calculation that involves the currently known mass of the Higgs boson, researchers predict this bubble would contain an ultra-strong Higgs field that would expand at the speed of light through space-time. The Higgs field inside that bubble will be stronger and have a lower energy level than its surroundings. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming." … This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. Here's how Hawking describes this Higgs doomsday scenario in the new book: "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). This quantum fluctuation will happen somewhere out in the empty vacuum of space between galaxies, and will create a "bubble," Lykken said.
If the Higgs field makes it over that energy hill, some physicists think the destruction of the universe is waiting on the other side.īut an unlucky quantum fluctuation, or a change in energy, could trigger a process called " quantum tunneling." Instead of having to climb the energy hill, quantum tunneling would make it possible for the Higgs field to "tunnel" through the hill into the next, even lower-energy valley. The huge amount of energy required to change into another state is like chugging up a hill. Right now the Higgs field is in a minimum potential energy state - like a valley in a field of hills and valleys. "Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states," Gian Giudice, a theoretical physicist at the CERN lab, where the Higgs boson was discovered, explained during a TED talk in October 2013. Physicists believe the Higgs field may be slowly changing as it tries to find an optimal balance of field strength and energy required to maintain that strength. The Higgs field emerged at the birth of the universe and has acted as its own source of energy since then, Lykken said.
That conclusion involves the Higgs field. This turns out to be the precise mass needed to keep the universe on the brink of instability, but physicists say the delicate state will eventually collapse and the universe will become unstable. The Higgs boson is about 126 billion electron volts, or about the 126 times the mass of a proton.
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