{"id":1469,"date":"2007-06-02T10:59:06","date_gmt":"2007-06-02T10:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/02\/theorists-messing-with-my-head\/"},"modified":"2007-06-02T10:59:06","modified_gmt":"2007-06-02T10:59:06","slug":"theorists-messing-with-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/02\/theorists-messing-with-my-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Theorists Messing With My Head"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just when I’m finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what’s going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with “Unparticle Physics”<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory–physics that cannot be described in terms of particles. I argue that it is important to take seriously the possibility that the unparticle stuff described by such a theory might actually exist in our world. I suggest a scenario in which some details of the production of unparticle stuff can be calculated. I find that in the appropriate low-energy limit, unparticle stuff with scale dimension d[script U]<\/sub> looks like a nonintegral number d[script U]<\/sub> of invisible particles. Thus dramatic evidence for a nontrivial scale invariant sector could show up experimentally in missing energy distributions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Were it anywhere other than Physical Review Letters<\/cite>, I would suspect that this was a put-on, just to mess with low-energy experimentalists. It’s an editor’s recommendation at PRL, though, so if it is a gag, it goes all the way to the top of the profession.<\/p>\n

I’m aware that this thing has been on the ArXiV<\/a> for months, and has generated a number of papers in response. Which hopefully means that somebody out there understands what it’s about, and can explain it to me as if I were a rather stupid child of four, because I’ve got nothing, here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just when I’m finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what’s going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with “Unparticle Physics”: I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field… Continue reading Theorists Messing With My Head<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}