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.