Is it real?

Tommaso Dorigo thinks the bump is "a problem in the modeling of backgrounds, one which was unnoticed before only because it is small enough to have escaped previous attempts at "tuning" the simulations". And Pauline Gagnon of CERN reports that ATLAS didn't see anything at that energy in 2010. But ATLAS this year has already generated ten times as much data as it did last year; so really we should just wait for an assessment based on this year's observations.

Other anomalous observations

Lubos Motl made a list of recent claims of BSM (beyond standard model) physics, and asked whether there are any papers out there which can explain at least two of these observations. I find especially interesting "A unified, flavor symmetric explanation for the t-tbar asymmetry and Wjj excess at CDF" by Nelson et al. There's no leptophobic Z' boson here, instead there's a flavor symmetry and new scalar fields. It's a little messy, but the first implementation of a new idea often is, so it would be of interest to understand the essence of how the model does its thing.

Elsewhere in Lubos's list, there's a bump at 325 GeV. What's quite interesting is that a bump around 325 GeV has been observed under two separate circumstances. A discussion with Tommaso Dorigo highlights the obvious reason why they "shouldn't" be the same particle. Still, physics has many possibilities, so maybe there's a way around this. If I was making a model with four generations, I'd start here.

Finally, although the initial claim of a 115 GeV Higgs at the LHC was not endorsed by the rest of the collaboration, it's an attractive value for theoretical reasons. So, if I was just trying to make a field theory model of what we see in our colliders, I guess I'd be looking for a four-generation model a la Lebed and Mayes, which generalized Nelson et al's mechanism, and which had a 115 GeV Higgs. In fact, I have no idea if all those proposals can coexist. But that's part of how theoretical progress occurs - you see if you can fit several things at once into your model, and either you can, or you can't, or you first have to change something...

Instant update

That didn't take long... A very brief investigation into the concept of tropical geometry revealed impressionistic connections to both the relatively orthodox approaches to real-world physics that I am investigating, and one of the wilder speculations that I have my eye on. If the idea was to learn something and to obtain a starting point for extended (beyond-standard-model) phenomenology, then that's mission accomplished already.

Hello world

Hello world. This blog has been created in order to document the results of an exercise in creative absurdity.

Today the physics blogs carry the news that a bump in the data, indicative of a new particle, which was reported last month, has now been confirmed at almost "5-sigma" significance. The most obvious interpretation is that it is a new neutral boson - generically called a Z' boson, since the Z is the known neutral boson - but one that is "leptophobic", coupling to quarks but not to leptons.

As a quasi-amateur physicist only just venturing into particle phenomenology, I'm still trying to settle on an approach which gives us back the Standard Model. I'm not ready for a new particle! More precisely, I have no "intuition" about what this might be, no guiding theoretical preference.

So here is where "absurdity" can help. It turns out that Leptophobia, as well as being an aversion to leptons, is a type of butterfly: a "neotropical genus", the Encyclopedia of Life informs me.

But I have noticed, in the physics preprints, an occasional reference to something called "tropical geometry" (about which I know nothing). And "genus" has a number of mathematical meanings, such as the number of "handles" on a topological object. Anyone familiar with Kaluza-Klein models and compactifications in string theory will understand that such topological properties of the extra dimensions can determine basic features of observable physics.

So here is the absurd premise of this blog: We shall explore the idea that the leptophobia of our new Z' boson (if that is what it is) has something to do with the genus of a tropical (or "neo-tropical") geometry in the hidden dimensions of space-time.

It is at least a way to learn some new mathematics, and to begin thinking about this new phenomenon.