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by robochat42
2363 days ago
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I love reading about high energy physics and this isn't the first account from a high energy theorist which excludes weariness at the lack of progress over the last decades. We can hope that someone has a breakthrough that unlocks a new era of high energy physics. Maybe the neutrino masses hold the key or new symmetries will be found. Maybe a small alteration will make an old idea viable. So many promising ideas have been shot down: Grand Unified Theories looked for proton decays, axions looked for light spontaneously going through solid walls and supersymmetry searched for new particles. Nothing was found. As an ex-physicist with a more experimental background in condensed matters, the real discussions and theories are way beyond me though. Just look at this paragraph from the article: "Assume we consider two-dimensional Schwinger model with one massless Dirac fermion of charge 2 [18]. More exactly, in addition to the dynamicalcharge-2 fermion, there is a heavy probe charge-1 fermion whose mass can be viewed as tending to infinity. Next, assume that in this model we compactify the spatial dimension on a circle of circumference L, i.e. impose either periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions on the fermion fields. Then one can show that this model has two discrete Z2 symmetries – one 0-form and another 1-form. These two global Z2 symmetries have generators which do not commute with each other [18]. Thus, only one of these symmetries can be implemented,the other one must be spontaneously broken. Hence, the ground state is doubly degenerate. In other words, we observe in this example (see Appendix on page 15 and also [17]) the power of the mixed anomalies – the prediction of the projective action of the symmetries and the ground state degeneracy. This is a strong result at strong coupling. Sorry for the pun... After [12, 13, 14] a large number of non-trivial applications has been worked out.Many relevant references can be found in [18, 19]." My hope is that there will be a revolution in accelerator technology. The LHC is a triumph of collaborative engineering but maybe the next accelerator will be based upon different principles such as wakefield acceleration or miniaturized accelerators. Or we could find different ways of testing high energy physics, more subtle than smashing two particles together! |
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