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Unraveling Nature's secrets: vector boson scattering at the LHC

22 September 2020 | By

In 2017, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the detection of a process in high-energy proton–proton collisions that had not been observed before: the vector boson scattering. It results in the production of two W particles with the same electric charge as well as two collimated sprays of particles called “jets" (see Figure 2). The observation of vector boson scattering didn't receive as much attention from the media as the Higgs discovery in 2012, even though it was an important event for the particle physics community. Another missing piece of the big puzzle had been found – the puzzle that is the mathematical description of the microscopic world (see Figure 1).

The W + and W – bosons are unstable particles, which decay (transform) into a lepton and an antilepton or a quark and an antiquark with a mean lifetime of only a few 10 -25 seconds. They have integer spin (characteristic of bosons) and are carriers of the weak force. Though the weak force is not directly experienced in everyday life, it is nevertheless important as it is responsible for radioactive β decay, which plays a role in the fusion of hydrogen into helium that powers the Sun's thermonuclear process.

To appreciate the importance of this discovery, it is instructive to follow the history of how and why the W + and W – bosons were introduced; it illustrates nicely how the interplay between experimental information, theoretical models and mathematical principles drives progress in physics.

With the observation of vector boson scattering, another missing piece of the big puzzle had been found – the puzzle that is the mathematical description of the microscopic world.

Enrico Fermi originally formulated a mathematical description of the weak force in 1933 as a “contact interaction” between particles, occurring at a single point without a carrier particle propagating the force. This formulation successfully described the known experimental observations, including the radioactive β decay for which it was developed. However it was soon realised that its predictions at high energy, a regime not yet experimentally accessible at that time, were bound to fail.

Indeed, Fermi's theory predicts that the production rate of some processes caused by the weak force – such as the elastic scattering of neutrinos on electrons – increases linearly with the neutrino energy. This continuous growth, however, leads to the violation of a limit derived from the conservation of probability in a scattering process. In other words, predictions become unphysical at a high enough energy. To overcome this problem, physicists modified Fermi's theory by introducing “by hand" two massive spin-one (“vector”) charged particles propagating the interaction between neutrinos and electrons, dubbed “intermediate vector bosons". This development came well before the discovery of the W bosons decades later.

So even if the discovery of the long-awaited W ± bosons in 1983 – and, five months later, of a neutral companion, the Z boson – didn't come as a real surprise to physicists, it was certainly an epochal experimental achievement. Fermi’s theory remains an example of an effective theory valid only at low energy (well below the mass of the force carrier boson) – an approximation of a more general, universally valid theory.

Along this line, the search for a consistent description of the fundamental forces between the ultimate constituents of matter has led to the Standard Model of particle physics: a mathematical construction based on fundamental principles and experimental observations. The Standard Model provides a coherent, unified picture of three of the four fundamental interactions, namely the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The fourth force, not included in the Standard Model, is gravity. So far, the Standard Model has been successful at describing a myriad of experimental measurements in the microscopic world. Its success is, by all means, mind blowing.

We do not know why natural phenomena are so well described by mathematical entities and relations but, experimentally, we know that it works. Just as Galileo said four hundred years ago, the big book of Nature is written in a mathematical language [1] – the Standard Model and Einstein’s theory of gravity, for example, are additional chapters of this book.

So far, the Standard Model has been successful at describing a myriad of experimental measurements in the microscopic world. Its success is, by all means, mind blowing.

Particle physics makes use of a theoretical tool in which all particles are represented mathematically by quantum fields. These entities encode properties like spin and mass of a particle. In the Standard Model, the existence of the electromagnetic, weak and strong force carriers follows from the invariance of the behaviour of quantum fields under a “local gauge transformation". This is a transformation from one field configuration to another, which can be imagined as a rotation in an abstract mathematical space. The parameters of the transformation may vary from point to point in space-time, and thus the transformation is defined as “local”. Gauge invariance or gauge symmetry is the lack of changes in measurable quantities under gauge transformations, despite the quantum fields (which represent particles) being transformed.

Gauge invariance holds if spin-one particles are introduced, which interact in a well-defined manner with the elementary constituents of matter such as electrons and quarks (constituents of the proton and neutron, or, more generally, of hadrons). These spin-one particles are interpreted as “the carriers of the interaction” between the matter particles, with the photon the carrier for the electromagnetic force, the W – , W + and Z bosons for the weak force, and eight gluons for the strong force. These are the (intermediate) vector bosons introduced above.

In this way, the Standard Model forces (or interactions) emerge in a very elegant manner from one general principle, namely a fundamental symmetry of Nature. Interestingly enough, in the model, the electromagnetic and weak interactions manifest themselves at high energy as different aspects of a single “electroweak" force, while at low energy the weak interaction remains feebler than the electromagnetic interaction. As a consequence, the photon, Z boson and W ± bosons are collectively named “electroweak gauge bosons".

In the example above, Fermi’s followed a bottom-up approach: going from an observation to a mathematical description (a contact-interaction theory), which was modified “by hand" with few additions to obey the general principle of probability conservation (known as “unitarity” in physics). Starting from this premise, the work of many physicists consequently led to a more general theory. One in which the description of the fundamental forces follows the opposite path: predictions are obtained from fundamental principles (as gauge invariance) in a mathematically and physically coherent framework. [2] The interplay between these two ways of developing knowledge had been common in physics since before Newton's time, and still valid today.

In both cases, a theory is successful not only when it describes the known experimental facts, but also when it has predictive power. The Standard Model possesses both virtues and examples of its predictive power include the discoveries of the Higgs boson and the neutral kind of weak interaction mediated by the Z boson.

As a matter of fact, the Standard Model tells us (much) more: the quantum fields representing the new spin-one particles will also transform under a local gauge transformation. To ensure that the measurable quantities describing their behaviour do not change (gauge invariance, mentioned above), interactions among the carriers of the weak force must also exist, as well as among the carriers of the strong force. These self-interactions may involve three or four gauge bosons. No self-interaction among photons is possible, except indirectly through virtual processes involving intermediate particles such as electrons, as observed in a dedicated ATLAS measurement .

The process first observed by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in 2017, characterised by the presence of two W bosons with the same electric charge and two jets, is a signature of the occurrence of an electroweak interaction. The dominant part of the process is due to the self-interaction among four weak gauge bosons; another central prediction of the Standard Model finally confirmed by the LHC experiments. This self-interaction manifests as a “vector boson scattering", where two incoming gauge bosons interact and produce two, potentially different, gauge bosons as final state particles. The production rate of this electroweak process is very low – lower than that of Higgs boson – which is why it was observed only recently. And just like the Higgs boson discovery, the observation of this process didn't come out of the blue.

At the Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider , which operated at CERN between 1989 and 2000 in what is today the LHC tunnel, physicists had already observed the self-interaction among three gauge bosons. They measured the production of a pair of gauge bosons of opposite charge, a W + and a W – boson, in the collisions of beams of electrons and positrons, the antiparticle of the electron. According to the Standard Model, three main processes contribute to this production. They proceed via the exchange of either a photon, neutrino or Z boson between the electron and positron of the initial state and the W pair of the final state (Figure 3).

The exchange of a photon or a Z boson occurs via the self-interaction of three weak gauge bosons: WWγ and WWZ, respectively. The main point here is that without considering all three processes, the calculated production rate would grow continuously with energy, leading to the already encountered unphysical behaviour. The observation of this process at LEP, with a production rate consistent with the Standard Model prediction, therefore confirmed the existence of a self-interaction among three bosons.

It is striking that the theory predicts the structure of each underlying process such that, even though each of them gives to the calculated production rate a contribution which at high energy becomes unphysical, violating unitarity, the unphysical behaviour cancels out when all of the processes are considered together.

By studying vector boson scattering, physicists can investigate the Higgs mechanism in the highest energy domain accessible, where there may be signs of new physics.

So far, so good – but there’s a catch. The W ± and Z bosons observed and identified by experiments as the carriers of the weak interaction are massive, yet gauge invariance is only preserved if the carriers are massless. Should physicists give up the principle of gauge invariance to reconcile the theory with experimental facts?

A solution to this puzzle was proposed in 1964, postulating the existence of a new spin-zero (“scalar”) field with a slightly more complex mathematical structure. While the basic laws of the forces remain exactly gauge symmetric, in the sense explained above, Nature has randomly chosen (among many possibilities) a particular lowest-energy state of this field, breaking with this choice the gauge symmetry in a limited way, called “spontaneous”.

The consequences are dramatic. Out of this new field, a new particle emerges – the scalar Higgs boson – and the W ± and Z bosons become massive. Physicists now believe that gauge symmetry was not always spontaneously broken. The universe transitioned from an “unbroken phase” with massless gauge bosons to our current “broken phase” during expansion and cool-down, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations is a great success of the Standard Model theory, especially when considering that it was found to have the mass that indirect clues were pointing to. While the Higgs boson mass is not predicted by theory, the existence of the Higgs boson with a given mass leaves a delicate footprint in natural phenomena such that, if measured very precisely (as was done at LEP and at Tevatron, the smaller predecessor of the LHC at Fermilab, nearby Chicago, USA), physicists could derive constraints on its mass. The Higgs boson’s discovery was thus an experimental prowess as well as a consecration of the Standard Model. It emphasized the remarkable role of the precision measurements at LEP, even though the energy of that accelerator was not high enough to directly produce the Higgs boson.

Obviously, the story doesn't end here. Solid indications exist that the Standard Model is not complete and that it must be encompassed in a more general theory. This possibility is not surprising. As Fermi’s weak interaction theory exemplifies, history has shown that a theory’s validity is related to the energy range (or, equivalently, size of space) accessible by experiments.

More generally, classical mechanics is appropriate and predictive for the macroscopic world, when the speed of the objects is small with respect to the speed of light. To describe the microscopic world, however, quantum mechanics must be invoked, and the special theory of relativity must be applied to appropriately describe the behaviour of objects moving close to light speed.

The LHC is the perfect place to look for rare processes like vector boson scattering, as it collides protons with the highest energy and rate ever reached.

How can physicists find experimental signs that may help to formulate a more general theory than the Standard Model?

A valuable approach is to directly search collision events for particles not included in the Standard Model. However this is inherently limited: only particles with a mass at or below the collision energy can be directly produced, due to the fundamental principle of energy conservation and following the equivalence between mass and energy. Alternative avenues, which suffer less from this limitation but are indirect, include performing very precise measurements of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model or measuring rare processes to look for deviations with respect to theoretical predictions. Such measurements are able to explore a higher energy domain, as the LEP Higgs-boson example showed.

Vector boson scattering is one of these rare processes. It is special because closely related to the Higgs mechanism, and able to shed light on unexplored corners of Nature at the highest energy available in a laboratory. Similar to the LEP vector-boson study described above, vector boson scattering is expected to proceed via several processes, this time including the self-interaction of four gauge bosons as well as the exchange of a Higgs boson (see Figure 4). Without accounting for all of the processes, the calculated scattering rate grows indefinitely with energy, leading to the above-mentioned unphysical behaviour (violation of unitarity).

It could be argued that this question is already settled, since we know that the Higgs boson exists. The key issue is that the way in which the Higgs boson interacts with the gauge bosons in the Standard Model is exactly what is required to moderate the growth of the scattering rate at high energy; a minimal deviation of the Higgs mechanism from the Standard Model prediction could result in an apparent breakdown of unitarity.

Vector boson scattering would then occur at a rate different from what is predicted by the Standard Model, and unitarity would have to be recovered by a yet-unknown mechanism. The study of vector boson scattering thus allows physicists to investigate the Higgs mechanism in the highest energy domain accessible, where there may be signs of new physics.

The LHC is the perfect place to look for rare processes like vector boson scattering, as it collides protons with the highest energy and rate ever reached. Furthermore, the ATLAS and CMS experiments are designed to select and record these rare events.

As weak gauge bosons are extremely short-lived particles, experiments search for the scattering of vector bosons by looking for the production of two jets and two lepton–antilepton pairs in proton-proton collisions. Imagine this as two gauge bosons being emitted by the quarks from each of the incoming LHC proton beams. These gauge bosons subsequently scatter off each other and the bosons emerging from this interaction promptly decay (see Figure 2). The quarks are subsequently deflected and appear in the detector as jets of particles, typically emitted at a relatively small angle with respect to the beam direction. This is called an “electroweak” process as it is mediated by electroweak gauge bosons.

The experimental signature of vector boson scattering is therefore characterised by the presence of the decay particles of the two bosons, accompanied by two jets with large angular separation. The W and Z bosons predominantly decay into a quark and antiquark pair. Nevertheless, the search of these rare events preferentially exploits the decays into a lepton and an anti-lepton because a concurrent process, the multi-jet production, being mediated by the strong interaction has an overwhelming rate and obscures processes with a much smaller rate.

Still, the search for vector boson scattering is very challenging. This is not only because the rate of the process is low – accounting for only one in hundreds of trillions of proton–proton interactions – but also because, even making use of the leptonic decays, several “background” processes produce the same kinds of particles in the detector, mimicking the process’ signal.

Due to its high rate, a particularly challenging background process is one in which the jets accompanying the decay products of the gauge bosons arise as a result of the strong-force interaction. The impact of this background with respect to the signal depends on the kind of gauge bosons which scatter. When they are W bosons with the same electric charge, the production rate of the two processes (signal and background) is comparable.

For this reason, same-charge WW production is considered the golden channel for experimental measurements and was the first target for the ATLAS Collaboration to study vector-boson-scattering processes. ATLAS physicists reported for the first time strong hints of the process in a 2014 paper – a milestone in the LHC physics programme. However, it took three more years to arrive at an unambiguous observation, passing the five-sigma threshold that particle physicists use to define a discovery and corresponding to a probability of less than one in 3.5 million that a signal observation could be due to a mere upward statistical fluctuation of the number of background events. In the years between the first hint and discovery, the LHC was upgraded to increase its proton–proton collision energy – from 8 TeV to 13 TeV – as well as its collision rate – yielding about six times more collected data. These improvements made observation of vector boson scattering possible – the era of its study had at last begun.

The Standard Model only allows a specific set of combinations of four-gauge-boson self-interactions: WWWW, WWγγ, WWZγ and WWZZ, forbidding interactions among four neutral bosons.

However, not all electroweak bosons are equal. While the observation of two same-charge W bosons has allowed physicists to start testing the interaction of four W bosons (WWWW, Figure 2), the quest to test other self-interactions remained. The Standard Model only allows a specific set of combinations of four-gauge-boson self-interactions: WWWW, WWγγ, WWZγ and WWZZ, forbidding interactions among four neutral bosons.

Not all of these electroweak interactions are predicted to have the same strength and, because of this, probing them requires identifying processes that are less and less frequent. Similarly to the case of two same-charge W bosons, electroweak processes involving two jets and a WZ pair, a Zγ pair, or a ZZ pair are increasingly rare or have significantly larger backgrounds. Hunting for such processes among the billions of proton–proton collisions recorded by ATLAS requires physicists to look for subtle differences in order to distinguish a signal from very similar background processes occurring at much higher rates.

While such a task was commonly regarded as requiring a much larger amount of data than collected so far, the LHC experiments used artificial-intelligence algorithms to distinguish between the sought-after signal and the much larger background. Thanks to such innovations, in 2018 and 2019, ATLAS reported the observations of WZ and ZZ electroweak production , and saw a hint of the Zγ process . Suddenly, this brand-new field saw a surge in the number of processes that could be used to probe the self-interaction of gauge bosons.

The most recent addition is ATLAS’ observation of two W bosons produced by the interaction of two photons , each radiated by the LHC protons. This phenomenon occurs when the accelerated protons skim each other, producing extremely high electromagnetic fields, with photons mediating an electromagnetic interaction between them. Such an interaction is only possible when quantum mechanical effects of electromagnetism are taken into account.

This is a direct and clean probe of the γγWW gauge bosons interaction. A peculiarity of this process is that the protons participate as a whole and can remain intact after the interaction; this is very different from inelastic interactions where the quarks, the protons’ constituents, are the main actors (see Figure 2).

Table 1 summarises the processes that are used to study vector boson scattering at the LHC. It also shows the four bosons involved in the self-interaction. The study of each process provides a different test of the Standard Model, as modifications of the theory can differently alter the strength of the self-interactions.

An extensive upgrade of the LHC experiments is also ongoing, which will improve further the detection capabilities for the vector-boson-scattering processes.

Now, ten years on from the first high-energy collisions took place in the LHC, the study of the vector boson scattering is a very active field – though still in its adolescence, both from the experimental and theoretical point of view. Experimentally, the size of the available signal sample is limited. The upcoming data-taking period (from 2022 to 2024) and the high-luminosity phase of the LHC (starting in 2027) will increase the amount of collected data by more than a factor two and by an additional factor of ten, respectively. An extensive upgrade of the LHC experiments is also ongoing, which will improve further the detection capabilities for the vector-boson-scattering processes.

In parallel, physicists will continue to improve their analysis methods, relying on more and more advanced artificial-intelligence algorithms to disentangle the rare signal processes from the abundant backgrounds. Physicists are also employing advanced calculation techniques to improve the precision of Standard Model predictions to match the increased measurement precision.

Furthermore, a bottom-up approach is being introduced which follows in the footsteps of Enrico Fermi. Physicists have developed a theoretical framework that allows new mathematical terms, respecting basic conservation rules and symmetries, to be added “by hand" to the Standard Model, without relying on a specific new physics model. These terms change the predictions in the high-energy regime where new physics could be expected (Figure 5). The simplest form of this approach is called Standard Model Effective Field Theory .

Even though we know that an effective theory cannot work at an arbitrary high energy scale, history has shown that, supplemented by measurements, it can provide useful guidance at lower energy. Different production-rate measurements – including those of the Higgs boson, boson self-interactions and the top quark – can be, separately or simultaneously, compared to predictions in the same effective theoretical framework.

It would be a sensation if more precise measurements indicated that such new terms are necessary to describe the data. It would be a sign of physics beyond the Standard Model and indication of the direction to take in order to develop a more complete theory, depending on which kinds of terms are needed. The interplay between experimental observations and models in the quest for a complete theory would continue.

Ultimately, all ongoing experimental collider and non-collider studies in particle physics will contribute to building knowledge – be they direct searches for new particles, precision measurements exploiting the power of quantum fluctuations or studies of rare processes. This experimental work is complemented by ever more precise theoretical calculations. In this task, the next generation of powerful particle accelerators now being planned are indispensable tools to find new phenomena that would help us understand the remaining mysteries of the microscopic world.

About the Authors

Lucia Di Ciaccio is a Professor of Physics at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (France) and member of the ATLAS Collaboration. During her career she has worked on different topics, including lepton and hadron collider physics. Her present research activity deals with the search for signs of new physics phenomena in the multiple gauge boson sector. Simone Pagan Griso is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and member of the ATLAS Collaboration. His research topics range from measurements of rare phenomena predicted by the Standard Model to direct searches of new particles that only exist in extension of the Standard Model theory, with emphasis on signatures that require the development of dedicated charged-particle reconstruction algorithms and innovative analysis techniques.

[1] Il Saggiatore (The Assayer) is a book published by Galileo Galilei in October 1623 and is considered to be one of the milestones of the scientific method, propagating the idea that Nature must described and understood using mathematical tools rather than scholastic philosophy, as generally was believed at the time.

[2] In some cases the postulated principles are inspired by experimental facts, like, for example, the measurement of the speed of light for the theory of special relativity.

Further reading

Scientific results.

• Observation of electroweak production of a same-sign W boson pair in association with two jets in proton–proton collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector (Phys.Rev.Lett. 123 (2019) 16, 161801, arXiv: 1906.03203)
• Observation of electroweak W ± Z boson pair production in association with two jets in proton–proton collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector (Phys. Lett. B 793 (2019) 469, arXiv:1812.09740)
• Observation of electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair with the ATLAS detector at the LHC (Submitted to NPHYS, arXiv: 2004.10612)
• Evidence for electroweak production of two jets in association with a Zγ pair in proton–proton collisions at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector (Phys. Lett. B 803 (2020) 135341, arXiv:1910.09503)
• CMS Collaboration: Observation of Electroweak Production of Same-Sign W Boson Pairs in the Two Jet and Two Same-Sign Lepton Final State in Proton-Proton Collisions at 13 TeV (Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 (2018) 081801, arXiv: 1709.05822)

News articles

• ATLAS observes W-boson pair production from light colliding with light , Physics Briefing, August 2020
• ATLAS observes light scattering off light , Physics Briefing , March 2019
• The Higgs boson: the hunt, the discovery, the study and some future perspectives , ATLAS Feature , July 2018
• The rise of deep learning , CERN Courier , July 2018
• ATLAS finds evidence for the rare electroweak W±W± production , Physics Briefing , September 2014
• The LEP story , CERN press , October 2000

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CERN Accelerating science

Language switcher, cern inaugurates steel sculpture.

"Wandering the immeasurable" – a 15-tonne sculpture next to the Globe of Science and Innovation – was inaugurated at a ceremony on Saturday

Monday, 08 December 2014

By Cian O'Luanaigh

At a ceremony on Saturday morning, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer and Mayor of Meyrin Monique Boget inaugurated "Wandering the immeasurable" – the 15-tonne steel sculpture by the Globe of Science and Innovation.

Twisting 11 metres into the air, the sculpture, which is shaped like a giant ribbon, pays homage to great discoveries in physics through the ages. Some 37 metres of steel are laser cut on the outside surface with 396 discoveries in their language of origin. Each shows a scientist's name and the year and nature of his or her breakthrough in the field of physics, astrophysics or mathematics.

The first inscription, written in cuneiform at the base of the sculpture, deals with sexagesimal calculations, discovered by the ancient Mesopotamians in around 1500 BC. Greek inscriptions follow from early thinkers such as Archimedes, before Chinese, Sanskrit and Arabic make their mark.

Electroplated on the inside surface of the sculpture, these same discoveries are represented with scientific symbols – early Babylonian sky maps and algebraic equations including Pythagoras' theorem and Einstein's famous e=mc 2 , culminate with the complex Langrangian equation that describes the Standard Model of particle physics.

"The steel ribbon rises from the Earth and twists as if on a peregrination – the science does not know where it will lead," says CERN's Bernard Pellequer, who initiated the sculpture project.

The sculpture was designed by Canadian artist Gayle Hermick and made possible by a one-off donation from the Fondation Meyrinoise du Casino. Swiss metalwork firm SENN-AG put the steel together.

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Talking Beautiful Stuff

All around us, people create beautiful stuff. let's talk about it.

“Wandering the Immeasurable” by Gayle Hermick

It is January. I am on a tram at the border of France and Switzerland just by CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research, (the Large Hadron Collider guys.) I notice a huge curling metal structure standing proud from the persistent snow. A biting wind dissuades interest beyond a long-distance snap with my iPhone.

On-line, I find that this work is “Wandering the Immeasurable” by Gayle Hermick. I speak to a physicist friend who works at CERN. “All of us love that sculpture!” he explains. “It tells the entire story of our field.” I am intrigued. This reminds me of a stroll through Cambridge (UK,) and how beautiful sculptures and paintings are used to pay tribute to the brilliant minds who have brought extraordinary advances in knowledge and ultimately changed humanity.

More snow. The weeks pass before I want to return. When I do, I find this to be a work of staggering beauty in which the aesthetic combines with what is probably the most important human narrative of all.

Hermick visited the CERN site in 2005. She was bowled over by the enormity of what the Large Hadron Collider represents: a massively ambitious experiment based on centuries of scientific exploration. What inspired her was the realization that any theory in physics is based on theories that came before it that, in turn, are based on other precedents. The connections between theories weave together the story of science. One side of the coiling stainless steel ribbon carries 396 important scientific and technical discoveries inscribed in their language of origin, accompanied by the names of their discoverers. The list begins with sexagesimal calculations in Mesopotamia from 4000 years ago and ends – for the time being – with the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. The tail of the ribbon remains suspended, as if awaiting future events.

The other side of the ribbon showcases mathematics: the language of science. This helps the visitor, whatever his or her background, to appreciate how mathematics underpins the 396 discoveries. The whole is accessible to the non-scientist and so resonates with the educational goals of CERN.

Putting the aesthetic and the narrative aside; the work is awe-inspiring as a technical accomplishment. It took a crew of metal workers over a year to make. The process involved specialists who could laser-cut the text and electro-plate the equations into stainless steel.

And what of the “who” behind this monumental work? Gayle Hermick trained in Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She gravitated to sculptural forms in clay. Metal was a natural evolution. She is tolerant of my persistence and generous with her time giving honest and elegant answers to my questions. I ask her how she won the commission for the work. She replies “It wasn’t a commission. I pitched the idea for a sculpture on the site after touring the then ‘in progress’ Large Hadron Collider. I did not visit CERN with a physics or mathematics background. The dance to create the right sculpture involved much research on my part and some to and fro with CERN to gain more insight into particle physics. I realized quickly that I did not have enough knowledge about contemporary physics to create a work about a specific theory but I also realized that I was in good company with most of the world.  My sculpture grew naturally from this point. I wanted it to be both a monument to what has been achieved and to inform myself, and hopefully others, about how we, humanity, got to the point of colliding particles just under the speed of light to understand what makes up our universe.” (Wow!) She continues “I was enthralled with the beautiful but impenetrable equations accompanying every article I researched.”

She tells me that whilst the inspiration for “Wandering the Immeasurable” was sparked by her 2005 visit to CERN, the visual concept came from the multicultural nature of CERN as an institution, its scientific goals, its educational goals and, by her own admission, her ignorance and confusion about contemporary physicists and theories. I cannot imagine that there exists many other sculptors with intellectual horizons as broad.

Naively, I ask her if, as a result of her extensive research, she has a favourite physicist or theorem. “This (the whole project) has been an exhilarating plunge into the history of science and physicists that will stay with me the rest of my life. I admire greatly the early scientists who came to their discoveries from different disciplines, there are so many – one, Gilbert, a physician, arrived at the conclusion the earth was magnetic which is why the compass points north. And there’s the ingenuity of Pascal’s calculating machine. Galileo’s dedication to observation is breathtaking; his thorough documentation of the moons of Jupiter and sun spots are astounding feats. I read about the careful tabulation of astronomical data from Brahe enabling Kepler to discover his laws of planetary motion. I enjoyed biographies of physicists: the Curies, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr, and Dirac to name a few. And what an exciting time in physics just prior to World War II!  After years of quiet experimentation, I believe (with discovery of the Higgs boson and the potential output from the Large Hadron Collider), we are in another exciting time for both cosmology and particle physics.” Does she understands physics now? “Robin I think this question is very funny!” she answers. “I think there are physicists who don’t understand contemporary physics.” She then lists, with citations, some prominent physicists who admit to not fully comprehending their chosen field. The list includes Einstein who, apparently, did not believe in quantum theory.

So, as the warmer weather approaches, why not visit CERN and Hermick’s stunning creation? Take a picnic, listen to music, take photos and consider…. but for those texts and equations, you wouldn’t have got there, you would have no leisure time because you would be so busy trying to find enough food for your picnic, there would be no way that music could be recorded and you wouldn’t be able to take photos because cameras wouldn’t exist. In brief, without those scientists and their discoveries, all of our lives, assuming we even existed, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

1 thought on “ “Wandering the Immeasurable” by Gayle Hermick ”

Really nice and captures pretty nicely why art and science are so closely linked 🙂

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Implementing a vision for CERN’s future

The 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics forms the basis of CERN’s objectives for the next five years, explains Fabiola Gianotti.

The European strategy for particle physics (ESPP), updated by the CERN Council in June 2020, lays the foundations for a bright future for accelerator-based particle physics. Its 20 recommendations – covering the components of a compelling scientific programme for the short, medium and long terms, as well as the societal and environmental impact of the field, public engagement and support for early-career scientists – set out an ambitious but prudent approach to realise the post-LHC future in Europe within the worldwide context.

Full exploitation of the LHC and its high-luminosity upgrade is a major priority, both in terms of its physics potential and its role as a springboard to a future energy-frontier machine. The ESPP identified an electron–positron Higgs factory as the highest priority next collider. It also recommended that Europe, together with its international partners, investigate the technical and financial feasibility of a future hadron collider at CERN with a centre-of-mass energy of at least 100 TeV, with an electron–positron Higgs and electroweak factory as a possible first stage. Reinforced R&D on a range of accelerator technologies is another ESPP priority, as is continued support for a diverse scientific programme.

Implementation starts now

It is CERN’s role, in strong collaboration with other laboratories and institutions in Europe and beyond, to help translate the visionary scientific objectives of the ESPP update into reality. CERN’s recently approved medium-term plan (MTP), which covers the period 2021–2025, provides a first implementation of the ESPP vision.

Starting this year, CERN will deploy efforts on the feasibility study for a Future Circular Collider (FCC) as recommended by the ESPP update. One of the first goals is to verify that there are no showstoppers to building a 100 km tunnel in the Geneva region, and to gather pledges for the necessary funds to build it. The estimated FCC cost cannot be met only from CERN’s budget, and special contributions from non-Member States as well as new funding mechanisms will be required. Concerning the enabling technologies, the first priority is to demonstrate that the superconducting high-field magnets needed for 100 TeV (or more) proton–proton collisions in a 100 km tunnel can be made available on the mid-century time scale. To this end CERN is implementing a reinforced magnet R&D programme in partnership with industry and other institutions in Europe and beyond. Fresh resources will be used to explore low- and high-temperature superconducting materials, to develop magnet models towards industrialisation and cost reduction, and to build the needed test infrastructure. These studies will also have vast applications outside the field. Minimising the environmental impact of the tunnel, the colliders and detectors will be another major focus, as well as maximising the benefits to society from the transfer of FCC-related technologies.

The 2020 MTP includes resources to continue R&D on key technologies for the Compact Linear Collider and for the establishment of an international design study for a muon collider. Further advanced accelerator technologies will be pursued, as well as detector R&D and a new initiative on quantum technologies.

Continued progress requires a courageous, global experimental venture involving all the tools at our disposal

Scientific diversity is an important pillar of CERN’s programme and will continue to be supported. Resources for the CERN-hosted Physics Beyond Colliders study have been increased in the 2020 MTP and developments for long-baseline neutrino experiments in the US and Japan will continue at an intense pace via the CERN Neutrino Platform.

Immense impact

The discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle with unprecedented characteristics, has contributed to turning the focus of particle physics towards deep structural questions. Furthermore, many of the open questions in the microscopic world are increasingly intertwined with the universe at large. Continued progress on this rich and ambitious path of fundamental exploration requires a courageous, global experimental venture involving all the tools at our disposal: high-energy colliders, low-energy precision tests, observational cosmology, cosmic rays, dark-matter searches, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and many more. High-energy colliders, in particular, will continue to be an indispensable and irreplaceable tool to scrutinise nature at the smallest scales. If the FCC can be realised, its impact will be immense, not only on CERN’s future, but also on humanity’s knowledge.

To explore all our coverage marking the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson ...

Fabiola Gianotti is Director-General of CERN. Her second term of office began in January 2021.

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Implementing a vision for CERN’s future

By Fabiola Gianotti

Fabiola Gianotti is the Director-General of CERN.

The 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics forms the basis of CERN’s objectives for the next five years, explains Fabiola Gianotti

4 February, 2021

The European strategy for particle physics (ESPP), updated by the CERN Council in June 2020, lays the foundations for a bright future for accelerator-based particle physics. Its 20 recommendations – covering the components of a compelling scientific programme for the short, medium and long terms, as well as the societal and environmental impact of the field, public engagement and support for early-career scientists – set out an ambitious but prudent approach to realise the post-LHC future in Europe within the worldwide context.

Full exploitation of the LHC and its high-luminosity upgrade is a major priority, both in terms of its physics potential and its role as a springboard to a future energy-frontier machine. The ESPP identified an electron–positron Higgs factory as the highest priority next collider. It also recommended that Europe, together with its international partners, investigate the technical and financial feasibility of a future hadron collider at CERN with a centre-of-mass energy of at least 100 TeV, with an electron–positron Higgs and electroweak factory as a possible first stage. Reinforced R&D on a range of accelerator technologies is another ESPP priority, as is continued support for a diverse scientific programme.

Implementation starts now It is CERN’s role, in strong collaboration with other laboratories and institutions in Europe and beyond, to help translate the visionary scientific objectives of the ESPP update into reality. CERN’s recently approved medium-term plan (MTP), which covers the period 2021–2025, provides a first implementation of the ESPP vision.

Starting this year, CERN will deploy efforts on the feasibility study for a Future Circular Collider (FCC) as recommended by the ESPP update. One of the first goals is to verify that there are no showstoppers to building a 100 km tunnel in the Geneva region, and to gather pledges for the necessary funds to build it. The estimated FCC cost cannot be met only from CERN’s budget, and special contributions from non-Member States as well as new funding mechanisms will be required. Concerning the enabling technologies, the first priority is to demonstrate that the superconducting high-field magnets needed for 100 TeV (or more) proton–proton collisions in a 100 km tunnel can be made available on the mid-century time scale. To this end CERN is implementing a reinforced magnet R&D programme in partnership with industry and other institutions in Europe and beyond. Fresh resources will be used to explore low- and high-temperature superconducting materials, to develop magnet models towards industrialisation and cost reduction, and to build the needed test infrastructure. These studies will also have vast applications outside the field. Minimising the environmental impact of the tunnel, the colliders and detectors will be another major focus, as well as maximising the benefits to society from the transfer of FCC-related technologies.

The 2020 MTP includes resources to continue R&D on key technologies for the Compact Linear Collider and for the establishment of an international design study for a muon collider. Further advanced accelerator technologies will be pursued, as well as detector R&D and a new initiative on quantum technologies.

Scientific diversity is an important pillar of CERN’s programme and will continue to be supported. Resources for the CERN-hosted Physics Beyond Colliders study have been increased in the 2020 MTP and developments for long-baseline neutrino experiments in the US and Japan will continue at an intense pace via the CERN Neutrino Platform.

Immense impact The discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle with unprecedented characteristics, has contributed to turning the focus of particle physics towards deep structural questions. Furthermore, many of the open questions in the microscopic world are increasingly intertwined with the universe at large. Continued progress on this rich and ambitious path of fundamental exploration requires a courageous, global experimental venture involving all the tools at our disposal: high-energy colliders, low-energy precision tests, observational cosmology, cosmic rays, dark-matter searches, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and many more. High-energy colliders, in particular, will continue to be an indispensable and irreplaceable tool to scrutinise nature at the smallest scales. If the FCC can be realised, its impact will be immense, not only on CERN’s future, but also on humanity’s knowledge.

This opinion piece was originally published in the CERN Courier . 

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CERN against COVID-19

CERN technologies and expertise are helping in the collective global fight against COVID-19

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From vehicles for local logistical support to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, particle physics resources are being made available to those who need them.

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Particle physics is a global community, coming together for a common cause.

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CERN’s Director-General established the CERN against COVID-19 task force in March 2020 to collect and coordinate ideas and contributions from the CERN community of over 18 000 people worldwide to the societal fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. These initiatives drew on scientific and technical expertise and facilities at CERN, in the Member State countries and beyond, and were carried out with that community and in close contacts with the relevant health institutions and experts from other fields.

We were very encouraged by the hundreds of emails we have received, and the enthusiasm of the community. Ideas ranged from the deployment of CERN’s powerful computing, engineering and technical resources to contribute to the global fight against COVID-19, to assisting the local effort through logistical and emergency response support.

The objective of the CERN against COVID-19 initiative was to ensure effective and well-coordinated action, drawing on CERN’s many competencies and advanced technologies and working closely with experts in healthcare, drug development, epidemiology and emergency response so as to maximise the impact of our contributions. Proposals and ideas were made by members of the CERN community.

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Peter Higgs obituary

Theoretical physicist whose name was attached to the Higgs boson, a sign of the mechanism underlying the structure of atoms

In 1964 the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who has died aged 94, suggested that the universe contains an all-pervading essence that can be manifested in the form of particles. This idea inspired governments to spend billions to find what became known as Higgs bosons.

The so-called “Higgs mechanism” controls the rate of thermonuclear fusion that powers the sun, but for which this engine of the solar system would have expired long before evolution had time to work its miracles on earth. The structure of atoms and matter and, arguably, existence itself are all suspected to arise as a result of the mechanism, whose veracity was proved with the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

The Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman famously described the boson as “the God particle”. Higgs, an atheist, found this inappropriate and misleading, but the name stuck and helped bring fame to the idea, and to Higgs. He in turn became a Nobel prizewinner in 2013.

It was at Edinburgh University, as a young lecturer in mathematical physics in the early 1960s, that Higgs became interested in the profound and tantalising ways in which properties – mathematical symmetries – in the equations describing fundamental laws can be hidden in the structures that arise.

For example, in space, unaffected by the earth’s gravity, a droplet of water looks the same in all directions: it is spherically symmetric, in agreement with the symmetry implied by the underlying mathematical equations describing the behaviour of water molecules. Yet when water freezes, the resulting snowflake takes up a different symmetry – its shape only appearing the same when rotated through multiples of 60 degrees – even though the underlying equations remain the same.

The Japanese-American physicist Yoichiro Nambu first inspired interest in this phenomenon, known as spontaneous symmetry breaking, in 1960. Encouraged by Nambu’s work, in 1964 Higgs’s own theory emerged with its explanation of how equations that call for massless particles (such as the quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, which leads to the massless photon) can, via the so-called Higgs mechanism, give rise to particles with a mass.

This idea would later be at the root of Gerardus ’t Hooft ’s proof in 1971 that unification of the electromagnetic force and the weak force, responsible for radioactivity, where a massive “W” particle plays the analogous role to the massless photon, is viable. The subsequent discovery of the W in 1983 gained Nobel prizes, both for the experiment and for theorists who had foreseen this. Underlying this success was the so-called Higgs mechanism, which controlled the mathematics in this explanation of the weak force.

When Nambu won the Nobel prize in 2008, it began to seem likely that the way was being prepared for Higgs’s eventual recognition.

A problem though, as Higgs was always the first to stress, was that he had not been alone in discovering the possibility of mass “spontaneously” appearing. Similar ideas had already been articulated by the condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson, though in a more restricted way, and by Robert Brout and François Englert in Belgium, who beat Higgs into print by a few weeks. A former colleague of Higgs at Imperial College London, Tom Kibble , and two colleagues were to write a paper along similar lines weeks later.

Where Higgs had justifiable claims to uniqueness was in the boson. He drew attention to the fact that in certain circumstances spontaneously broken symmetry implied that a massive particle should appear, whose affinity for interacting with other particles would be in proportion to their masses.

It would be discovery of this particle that could give experimental verification that the theory is indeed a description of nature. Although even this boson was arguably implicit in other work, it was Higgs who articulated most sharply its implications in particle physics.

The eponymous “Higgs boson” became the standard-bearer for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the early 1990s the science minister William Waldegrave issued his challenge: explain the Higgs boson on a sheet of paper and help me to convince the government to fund this.

Among the winners, the most famous was the analogy, by David Miller of University College London, of Margaret Thatcher – a massive particle – wandering through a cocktail party at the Tory conference and gathering hangers-on as she moved. Higgs, whose politics were diametrically opposite to hers, expressed himself as being “very comfortable” with the description.

He was always uncomfortable as a celebrity. When Cern – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – prepared to switch on the LHC in 2008, the media promoted it as a quest for the Higgs boson.

Higgs felt that Cern was misguided to talk up “the” boson – he was always the first to stress that others had had much the same idea and that naming it after him was unfair. He once modestly described the detection of the boson as “tying up loose ends” and regarded the main excitement of the LHC as its potential to reveal the secrets of dark matter and other kinds of new physics.

Nonetheless, in July 2012, Cern announced the discovery of a particle “with Higgs-like properties”. Media frenzy grew, and Higgs bravely accepted his fate as a centre of attention.

Although most physicists were sure that the eponymous boson had been discovered, several months’ more study would be needed before complete confirmation could be assured: the Nobel prize for 2012 went elsewhere. By 2013 the evidence was compelling; there was a general expectation that 2013 would be the year.

By this stage, 49 years had elapsed since Higgs had written his first paper on the subject. In a final, nailbiting twist, the announcement of his long-awaited success was delayed by an hour as the Nobel committee struggled to reach the famously reclusive scientist. Aware of the media attention he was likely to get, Higgs had decided to be “somewhere else” when the announcement was made, and told colleagues that he planned to take a holiday in the north-west Highlands of Scotland .

As the date approached, however, he realised that this was not a good plan for that time of the year, so he decided to stay at home and be somewhere else at the right time. At around 11am on 8 October, he left home and by noon, when the announcement should have been made, he was in Leith, by the shore, in a bar called the Vintage, which Higgs famously attested sold both food and “rather good beers”.

Thus with Higgs incommunicado (he largely avoided using mobile phones or the internet), after more than an hour of unsuccessful attempts to reach him, the Swedish Academy decided to make the public announcement anyway. The ironic result was that by 2pm, the news that Peter Higgs and Englert , of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, were the winners of the Nobel prize for physics was known to the world, but not to Higgs himself. (Englert’s colleague Brout had died in 2011, and was unable to be included as Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.)

Higgs later recalled how, “after a suitable interval”, but still ignorant of the news, he had made his way home from lunch. However, he delayed further by visiting an art exhibition, as “it seemed too early to get home, where reporters would probably be gathered”.

At about three o’clock he was walking along Heriot Row, heading for his flat in the next street, when a car pulled up near Queen Street Gardens. A lady got out “in a very excited state” and told Higgs: “My daughter’s just phoned from London and told me about the award.” To which Higgs replied: “What award?” As he explained, he was joking, but that is when his expectations were confirmed.

His plan had been a success, as, “I managed to get in my front door with no more damage than one photographer lying in wait.” A little more than a decade later, the main focus of the LHC has been to produce large numbers of Higgs bosons in order to understand the nature of the omnipresent essence that they form.

During the coronavirus lockdown I talked with him for hours on the phone at weekends in the course of researching the biography Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (2022). When asked to summarise his perspective on public reaction to the boson he said: “It ruined my life.” To know nature through mathematics, to see your theory confirmed, to win the plaudits of peers and win a Nobel prize, how could this equate with ruin? He explained: “My relatively peaceful existence was ending. I dont enjoy this sort of publicity. My style is to work in isolation, and occasionally have a bright idea.”

Higgs spent more than half a century as a theoretical physicist at Edinburgh University. Perhaps because of this, he was described in many media reports as a “Scottish physicist”, whereas in fact he was born in Newcastle , of English parents, Gertrude (nee Coghill) and Thomas Higgs.

His father was a sound engineer with the BBC, and the family moved almost immediately to Birmingham, where Peter spent his first 11 years. In 1941, with the second world war intensifying, the BBC decided that Birmingham was too dangerous, and its operations were transferred to Bristol . The Higgs family duly moved there, with the intention of avoiding aerial bombardment, but the following weekend the centre of Bristol was heavily bombed.

In Bristol, Higgs attended Cotham grammar school, where a famous former pupil had been the Nobel physicist Paul Dirac . Dirac’s name was prominent on the honours board. Higgs followed him, but initially in mathematics rather than physics. Higgs’s father had a collection of maths books, which inspired Peter and enabled him to be become far ahead of the class. His interest in physics was sparked in 1946, upon hearing the Bristol physicists, later Nobel laureates, Cecil Powell and Nevill Mott describing the background to the atomic bomb programme. Although this helped determine his career, Higgs himself later became a member of CND.

At King’s College London he studied theoretical physics, going on to gain his PhD in 1954. He was working on molecular physics, applying ideas of symmetry to molecular structure. His interests moved towards particle physics, and his office was on the same corridor as those of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins , two of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, though his work had no immediate link to their programme.

He won research fellowships, first at the University of Edinburgh (1954-56), then in London at University College (1956-57), and at Imperial College (1957-58). He was appointed lecturer in mathematics at University College London in 1958, and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1960, where he spent the rest of his research career. Initially lecturer in mathematical physics, in 1970 he was appointed reader and, in 1980, professor of theoretical physics. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974, and FRS in 1983.

He met his future wife, the linguist Jody Williamson, at a CND meeting in 1960. They married in 1963, and had two sons, Christopher and Jonathan. Although they separated, they remained friends until her death in 2008.

Higgs won several awards in addition to the 2013 Nobel prize. In addition to numerous honorary degrees, these included the 1997 Dirac medal and prize from the Institute of Physics , the 2004 Wolf prize in physics, the Sakurai prize of the American Physical Society in 2010, and the Edinburgh medal in 2013. That year he was also appointed Companion of Honour, and two years later he won the Copley medal of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific prize.

His sons survive him.

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