Not Even Wrong

Fresh off its great long article about the Higgs, the New York Times is devoting a similar amount of space to the other big mind-blowing high energy physics story of the past year or two, Paul Frampton and his adventures in South America. This coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a feature article on The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble, which covers the whole amazing story well.

This morning an e-mail came in from the “Science Publishing Group”, a call for “Editorial Board Members, Reviewers and Paper” for their open access journals, advertised as

Full peer review: All manuscripts submitted to our journals undergo double blind peer review.
Fast publication: Fast peer review process of papers within approximately one month of submission.

This included a special deal on the “Article Processing Charge”: \$70 or \$120 before May 15. I’ve been highly suspicious of all “author pays” open access schemes in math or physics, so I decided to check into what this one was. When I went to their web-site and looked at their list of journals, the first on the list that looked like it would have material in it I would know something about was the American Journal of Modern Physics. The first paper that showed up on the journal web-page was MSSM Neutral Higgs Production Cross Section Via Gluon Fusion and Bottom Quark Fusion at NNLO in QCD by Tetiana Obikhod, so I took a quick look at it.

It looked perfectly competent, but oddly it wasn’t on the arXiv, and the only papers by that author on the arXiv appeared to be some papers on F-theory and D-branes from 1997-98. A little bit of investigation quickly showed that much of the paper was plagiarized from elsewhere, including at least a 2003 paper by Harlander and Kilgore, Higgs boson production in bottom quark fusion at next-to-next-to-leading order and a 2011 paper by Bagnaschi et al. Higgs production via gluon fusion in the POWHEG approach in the SM and in the MSSM (neither of which are listed in the references).

For instance, the AJMP paper introduction has

In the Standard Model the gluon fusion process [12] is the dominant Higgs production mechanism at the LHC. The total cross section receives very large next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections, which were first computed in [13]. Later calculations [14, 15] retained the exact dependence on the masses of the top and bottom quarks running in the loops. The next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections are also large, and have been computed in [16]. The role of electroweak (EW) corrections has been discussed in [17]. The impact of mixed QCD-EW corrections has been discussed in [18]. The residual uncertainty on the total cross section depends on the uncomputed higher-order QCD effects and on the uncertainties that affect the parton distribution functions (PDF) of the proton [19].

while Bagnaschi et al. has

In the Standard Model (SM) the gluon fusion process [4] is the dominant Higgs production mechanism both at the Tevatron and at the LHC. The total cross section receives very large next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections, which were first computed in ref. [5] in the so-called heavy-quark effective theory (HQET), i.e. including only the top-quark contributions in the limit mt → ∞. Later calculations [6, 7, 8, 9, 10] retained the exact dependence on the masses of the top and bottom quarks running in the loops. The next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections are also large, and have been computed in the HQET in ref. [11]. The finite-top-mass effects at NNLO QCD have been studied in ref. [12] and found to be small. The resummation to all orders of soft gluon radiation has been studied in refs. [13, 14]. Leading third-order (NNNLO) QCD terms have been discussed in ref. [15]. The role of electroweak (EW) corrections has been discussed in refs. [16, 17, 18, 19]. The impact of mixed QCD-EW corrections has been discussed in ref. [20]. The residual uncertainty on the total cross section depends mainly on the uncomputed higher-order QCD effects and on the uncertainties that affect the parton distribution functions (PDF) of the proton [21, 22, 3].

In the body of the AJMP paper, for example starting at the bottom of page 3 with

The subprocesses to be evaluated at the partonic level are given as following…

the following material in the paper including the equations is an edited version of Harlander and Kilgore, starting at their page 4 with

The subprocesses to be evaluated at the partonic level are given as following…

As far as I can tell without spending more time on it, the author did run some kind of package to calculate something (the plots in the paper aren’t in the older papers), and then wrote the surrounding paper largely by plagiarizing the other two papers. There’s a good reason this one isn’t on the arXiv: they now run an automated system which would have immediately identified the plagiarism problem.

It’s possible that I just got unlucky, that there was a problem only with the first of the papers I looked at, but this seems unlikely. I realize that this is a very obvious case of a journal with extremely low standards, run to make money off of the increasingly popular “author pays” model of financing journals, but I’m hoping that those that are trying to move high-quality journals to this model are seriously thinking through the issues involved. Just this month in the AMS Notices, there is discussion of a proposal to move two of the AMS journals in that direction. Yes, this is very different than AJMP, but there’s an argument to be made about the “author pays” model that it is best avoided, since it’s a good idea to keep academic and vanity publishing strictly separate endeavors.

This should be a month with quite a bit of experimental news, including

• Latest Higgs news from the LHC experiments here on Wednesday.
• Release of data from AMS-02 was advertised as “two to three weeks away” back on February 17.
• Planck data release on March 21.

A couple weeks ago, Arianna Borrelli of the Epistemology of the LHC project gave a talk at CERN (slides here). It includes some interesting data from surveys of HEP physicists in September 2011 and September 2012.

The Simons Foundation website keeps having some of the best writing on math and physics around. Natalie Wolchover has an excellent story about a complex subject, that of the role of computers in proof. The also have an essay by Barry Mazur about another complicated related subject, the nature of evidence in mathematics.

Finally, if you want to watch a very good introduction to D-modules, see video from David Ben-Zvi at MSRI here and here.

Update: Edward Witten will be speaking here in New York this evening (Monday March 4) at Hunter College, for more information see here. Unfortunately I have other plans and will have to miss this.

Results putting new limits on SUSY based on the entire first run of the LHC are starting to emerge (see for example this from CMS) with more likely at Moriond next week. Since one is dealing with a theory with a large number of parameters, these are hard to characterize in a simple way. One thing to focus on is the limits on gluinos, since just about every popular version of SUSY says these should be about the easiest thing for the LHC to see. Very roughly, the Tevatron was able to set typical limits of about 300 GeV on such things, and the LHC at 8 TeV (4 times the Tevatron) is now giving limits around 4 times higher, 1.2 TeV. This is not likely to change much for the next few years until after the LHC comes back at 13 TeV in 2015. One can with some confidence predict that the gluino mass limit will then go up to about (13/8)*1.2 TeV or around 2 TeV, maybe a bit more in years after that with a high-luminosity LHC. Farther out in time, the next machine under discussion that could raise the limit is the HE-LHC, at 32 TeV, giving limits around 5 TeV. The time scale for this though is something like 2030-40, even assuming such a project ever were to get funded. I suspect the right characterization of that project might be “not in my lifetime”.

There is a new paper out claiming to see evidence of a gluino in the data around 1000-1100 GeV. The same authors (see here), have been claiming to see such gluinos since the early LHC data, first at around 7-800 GeV, with a mass getting higher with each round of new data and higher mass limits.

Few are likely to pay attention to this, but what is getting taken much more seriously is the case that Nima Arkani-Hamed has been vigorously making recently (see for example his talk at the Higgs Symposium). Arkani-Hamed is now by far the most influential theorist in this area, with slides from his latest talks often appearing in many other people’s presentations, functioning as the embodiment of the conventional wisdom of the field. He also is the only phenomenologist with a $3 million Fundamental Physics prize, awarded for his work on models that have had great influence, although zero success experimentally.

One of these, split supersymmetry, is what he is now promoting as the explanation for the negative LHC results. In this model, which he developed with Savas Dimopoulos back in 2004, the main argument for SUSY, the hierarchy argument, gets abandoned in favor of anthropics. The Higgs mass and the electroweak scale are what they are not because of SUSY, but because otherwise physics would be different and we wouldn’t be here. Once one abandons the hierarchy argument, the remaining arguments for SUSY are extremely weak (I’ll try and explain these in more detail in a separate posting), but for some reason Arkani-Hamed still thinks the idea is worth promoting and that vindication for his $3 million may yet be had.

Split SUSY works by moving all scalar superpartners up to unobservably high energies, but a few particles including the gluino are supposed to be at potentially observable masses. Back in 2004, Arkani-Hamed and Dimopoulos were hopeful about the possibilities for the LHC seeing a split SUSY gluino, writing:

However, at peak luminosity of 30 fb^-1 per year, the LHC may well be a gluino factory producing roughly a gluino per second(for m_g ∼ 300 GeV).

These hopes have now been dashed, and at the Higgs symposium talk, illustrative spectra show gluino masses at 2.1 and 2.3 TeV (this may just be because that’s about the limit of what the LHC could see). Arkani-Hamed and co-authors have a recent paper out discussing Simply Unnatural Supersymmetry, i.e. “the simplest picture of the the world arising from fine-tuned supersymmetric theories”. Here calculations are done for gluino masses ranging from 1.5 to 15 TeV, and the story is that we’ll have to be lucky to get any experimental evidence for this model. They end with:

If Nature has indeed chosen the path of un-natural simplicity, we will have to hope that she will be kind enough to let us discover this by giving us a spectrum with electroweak-inos lighter than ∼ 300 GeV or gluinos lighter than ∼ 3 TeV.

So, the current state of the conventional wisdom about SUSY from its most influential proponent is pretty much the following. It’s still the thing to try and sell to the public as the best bet for the future of physics, but the hierarchy argument is gone, and at a fundamental level it’s anthropics, the landscape and the multiverse. He’s pretty much given up hope of ever getting any experimental evidence for this, other than the outside possibility of maybe the gluino mass being just low enough to be visible in rare LHC events late in the decade.

The interesting question about all this I think is a sociological one: will this untestable and rather ugly theory based on anthropic reasoning become widely seen as the “best hope” for fundamental particle theory? In a post-LHC world where mankind has abandoned the high-energy frontier, will the conventional wisdom of the textbooks be that SUSY and those gluinos must be there, but unfortunately happen to be just out of reach?

Update: For a survey article that just came out this evening, which tries to show that the main argument for SUSY (the hierarchy problem) is not quite dead yet, see here.

Update: New Scientist has a special section this week about “Crunch time for physics” (unfortunately mostly behind a paywall). On SUSY, Frank Wilczek is still a believer, based on the renormalization group calculation he was a co-author of back in 1981. If no SUSY turns up at the next LHC run though, even he will throw in the towel:

I cannot believe this success is an accident. But in science faith is a means, not an end. Supersymmetry predicts new particles, with characteristic properties, that will come into view as the LHC operates at higher energy and intensity. The theory will soon undergo a trial by fire. It will yield gold – or go up in smoke.

He has a bet with Garrett Lisi that superparticles will be detected by July 8, 2015.

Posting has been light recently, partly since I’ve been working on writing up notes for my course (more about that soon), but largely because there hasn’t been a lot of news to write about in the math-physics world. The LHC shutdown yesterday, with the latest online machine status report now saying:

No beam for a while. Access required. time estimate: ~2 years

It will take about that long to replace magnet interconnections and do other work required to get the LHC working at an energy close to the design energy of 7 TeV/beam (seems likely they’ll be trying for 6.5 TeV/beam).

Results from the full 2012 data set for the Higgs are likely to be released soon, at Moriond in early March. Not much in the way of rumors available about this, which may have something to do with no surprises in the data. I hear there will also be, as expected, yet more stringent limits on SUSY reported.

For a US-centric series of reports on HEP and future plans, see talks here at a meeting this week at Fermilab.

On the cosmology front, there should be big news next month with Planck finally reporting results on March 21 (see here), to be followed by a conference dedicated to the results a couple weeks later.

No matter how cosmology is doing as a science, the Templeton Foundation is doing its part to promote its non-scientific aspects, with major funding for projects designed to promote and institutionalize the subject of “Philosophy of Cosmology”. Just before the Planck data release, DAMTP will host a Templeton-funded conference on “Infinities and Cosmology”, which will include two lectures by Michael Douglas on “Can we test the string theory landscape?”. Templeton is also funding a three-week summer institute in Santa Cruz to “promote understanding and research” on topics like “reasons for believing in a multi-verse, anthropic arguments, the metaphysics of laws and chance, why anything at all exists.” If you want to spend three weeks this summer among the redwoods discussing such topics, and collect a check for $2500 from Templeton, apply now.

Sometimes I make fun of pseudo-scientific research favored by some Northern California physicists by speculating about the role of marijuana in their research efforts. On a much more serious note, Southern California’s John Schwarz and his wife Patricia have been involved in admirable efforts to change US policy against investigating medical uses of marijuana, with Schwarz writing an editorial here last year, and speaking at a conference in DC next week.

For more evidence of how ideas about string theory have worked their way into US general cultural life, a couple people have pointed me to Adam Gopnik’s piece about Galileo in last week’s New Yorker, which contains the following:

Contemporary historians of science have a tendency to deprecate the originality of the so-called scientific revolution, and to stress, instead, its continuities with medieval astrology and alchemy. And they have a point. It wasn’t that one day people were doing astrology in Europe and then there was this revolution and everyone started doing astronomy. Newton practiced alchemy; Galileo drew up all those horoscopes. But if you can’t tell the difference in tone and temperament between Galileo’s sound and that of what went before, then you can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese. The difference is apparent if you compare what astrologers actually did and what the new astronomers were doing. “The Arch-Conjuror of England” (Yale), Glyn Parry’s entertaining new biography of Galileo’s contemporary the English magician and astrologer John Dee, shows that Dee was, in his own odd way, an honest man and a true intellectual. He races from Prague to Paris, holding conferences with other astrologers and publishing papers, consulting with allies and insulting rivals. He wasn’t a fraud. His life has all the look and sound of a fully respectable intellectual activity, rather like, one feels uneasily, the life of a string theorist today.

An important recent development in geometry has been the announcement of two claimed proofs of a long-standing conjecture about the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics. Simon Donaldson is talking about this at MIT this week (see here and here), and the last in a series of his papers with Xiuxiong Chen and Song Sun giving details of their proof appeared on the arXiv earlier this week, see here. For the earlier papers in the series, see here and here, as well as the original announcement of the proof in outline here. Gang Tian also has a preprint with a proof, see here. As usual in mathematics, one might want to wait for these preprints to be refereed by experts before being sure that a proof is in hand.

Given any manifold, there’s an infinity of ways of putting a metric on it. A major theme in modern geometry and topology has been the pursuit of the idea that in many cases there may be a unique “best” choice for such a metric. The proof of the Poincaré Conjecture involved just this sort of idea, showing that starting with any metric on a simply-connected three-manifold one could deform it in a specific way to end up with certain special possibilities that could be completely analyzed.

For Kähler manifolds, the big open question of this kind has been that of whether one can find a unique metric that is both Kähler and Einstein (thus “Kähler-Einstein”). For negative first Chern class this was shown by Aubin and Yau, and for zero first Chern class by Yau in his proof of the Calabi conjecture (these are the “Calabi-Yau” manifolds). For positive Chern class there are counter-examples, but the conjecture has long been that Kähler manifolds satisfying an appropriate notion of “stability” will have such a unique Kähler-Einstein metric, and it is this conjecture that apparently has now been proven.

The details of this are far beyond my expertise, so I refer you to the papers quoted above, as well as some expository articles about the problem by Donaldson and Tian, as well as a series of blog posts (here, here, and here) by Terry Tao based on lectures by Yau.

• Resonaances has an excellent posting about the latest WMAP9 CMB measurements, and the value N_eff for the number of implied light degrees of freedom. When the WMAP numbers were released late last year, they quoted

  N_eff=3.89+/-.67, 3.26+/-.35, 2.83+/-.38

  for the results of fits to their data and others (see section 4.3.2). Jester described this as “like finding a lump of coal under the Christmas tree”: the value N_eff=3 implies no new light degrees of freedom beyond the known 3 light neutrinos. A rumor soon appeared on his blog that this result was in error and would be corrected.
  The corrected version is now out, with new results

  N_eff=3.89+/-.67, 3.84+/-.40, 3.55+/-.49

  and a note about the correction: “slight correction to Neff for case with BAO.”
  which seems reasonable if you regard the difference between finding no unknown degrees of freedom and discovering a new unknown one as “slight”.

• Martin Perl has an interesting blog entry entitled What Me Worry About The Future of High Energy Physics? He describes his views about the problems facing HEP, what he thinks of the Fundamental Physics Prize, and some comments on the history of physics (as well as some kind words about this blog).
• On the Beauty front, you can watch a video of Enrico Bombieri’s lecture at the IAS on Beauty in Mathematics. On February 15 in Boston the big AAAS annual meeting will include a session on Is Beauty Truth? Mathematics in Physics from Dirac to the Higgs Boson and Beyond.
• viXra log has a posting about video released by CMS of the session on June 15th where their convincing evidence for the Higgs in gamma-gamma decays was first unveiled to the larger collaboration. It was at this point that most of the 3000 or so physicists in CMS knew for sure they had a Higgs discovery. One can speculate about what the graph of number of people in the world aware of this would look like as a function of time, but I’m sure by June 17th when I first heard about it, it was already much more than 3000, and growing exponentially.

  This was about three weeks before the public announcement on July 4. Of course now what we all want to know is what the full 2012 CMS dataset says about gamma-gamma, and whether it agrees with the SM or not. The general assumption is that this will be made public at the March 2-9 conference in Moriond. So, based on the timetable last time, one can guess that within the next week or two such results will be disclosed to the full CMS collaboration.

• As every year, one can follow the latest trend in US particle theory hiring at the tenure track level here. Lubos Motl describes the current situation as one of hep-th being subjected to terrorism, I guess by hep-ph.