this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
16 points (80.8% liked)
science
14870 readers
42 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The point with the LHC is, that it is very hard to find something, that you are not actively looking for. You have to at least have a certain understanding of the decay channels of the proposed particle to be able to scan the data for it. It's the same problem they have for discovering dark matter particles.
Sure. In model building like this I would assume that you'd make the particle heavy to explain absence from experiments, or you'd make it couple in strange ways. Do the authors here do either? Higgs was hard to find because a little bit of both, dark matter is from the couplings entirely (no coupling to the SM). The scalar, I assume, is not dark matter (that is the claim here), so it must couple to SM so unless heavy it most likely should have shown up at LHC. It is a similar problem, but not the same. If it is the couplings and not the mass that should explain the absence then is there anything in the model that would give a hint to how it couples to anything in the SM? I doubt it, because this is basically pure GR work from what I understand, and not QFT. But, I don't know, I'm just being sceptical here.
I mean, it doesn't have to relate to a particle. Lambda is also associated with a property of space itself.
Well... And so can scalars, sure, like in string theory where scalar fields represent various kinds of aspects of geometry of the extra dimensions. But they are, also this scalar, dynamical fields (which the CC is not) and these fields would correspond to "particles". You couple this field to all the other fields of the SM and you get interactions, you have particles. Its a particle.
This is why I know this is generally a problem, in string theory you have all these scalars that comes from compactification, you need to explain why they are not seen by experiments = make them heavy. Otherwise you get new particles, new forces, lots of physics that is not real.