The Dark Side of Open Access

January 18, 2013

Not Open_Access_logo2If you are an independent researcher as I am you will know the feeling of despair when you find a reference to a useful looking paper that is hidden behind a journal’s paywall with no free version available on the internet. Research institutions pay subscriptions that allow their members unfettered access but the rest of us have to pay a fee. For this reason I welcome the gradual move towards open access journals that will eventually mean that all research is available online with free access to everyone, but there is a darker side to this movement that I am a lot less keen on. Let’s take Philica as an example of an open access journal that I would certainly consider publishing as a show of support. It accepts submissions in any subject and I particularly like it because its peer-reviews are made public and allow for dynamic changes when subsequent research supports or refutes a published work. Unfortunately there is a catch for independent scientists. You can only register to publish in Philica if you are a full-time researcher employed by a  university, hospital and other research institution. Apparently open access does not mean open to submissions from all authors [update: 21/2/2014 The policy at philica has apparently changed a little and independent researchers can apply for membership if they can show that they are capable researchers].

In the traditional publication model it would be very unusual to find a journal that placed explicit limitation on who could publish in its pages. It is not something I had experienced before, but with open access journals this is becoming more common. For now there are still plenty of small open access journals that take submissions from anyone, but will they last? I sense that the thin edge of the wedge is in place and as it is driven in we will see unapproved researchers driven out in an effort to reduce the costs of publication. The result could have unexpected consequences for science and society.

Green, Gold or Diamond

Open access usually means that anyone can access papers for free. This comes in different forms sometimes termed green or gold open access. With green open access the journal allows authors to place a version of their paper on the internet where anyone can access it for free. Usually they do not allow the typeset version produced by the journal in this way but there is nothing to stop the online version being updated to reflect all changes made as a result of the peer-review. This works for the journals because university libraries cannot rely on authors to provide the open access copy and must therefore continue to pay the journal subscription.

With gold open access the journal itself provides a free copy of every paper online. Some long-standing journals experimented with this option but found very quickly that libraries would cancel subscriptions cutting off the journals revenue stream.  In some cases they have agreed to allow open access after a delay of a few years but new research is most relevant as soon as it appears so this is not a very satisfactory solution. Under pressure from funding agencies the new trend is for the journals to move towards payments from authors as an alternative to library subscriptions, but the payments can be several thousand dollars per publication which makes life particularly difficult for areas of theoretical science that can produce many papers with a low-budget. It is of course especially difficult for most independent scientists who may have no funding at all.

For professional scientists the ideal standard for open access is now being called platinum or diamond access meaning that it is free to publish and free to access. However, this does not mean that it is open for anyone to publish. There is no name available for that level of standard because professional researchers do not feel a need for it. Their only real concern is to reduce the cost of publishing which impacts research budgets. In order to make diamond open access possible it is necessary to reduce the cost of running a journal to virtually zero. This is perfectly feasible since the essential work of editors and reviewers is done for free by scientists out of a sense of duty and career promotion. If journals are published online only, the costs are reduced to whatever is required to run a website. This can also be reduced to essentially nil if there is a centrally run infrastructure.

This week Field medalist Sir Timothy Gowers has announced a new initiative funded in France that will provide just such as infrastructure. Scientists will be able to pull together and quickly set up epijournals in whatever area of science they choose at virtually no cost. Although they will be free to charge a publication fee if they wish, this is likely to be very low or zero and reader access will always be freely available because the system will run on the back of the HAL archive which is an arXiv mirror and open access to all readers. This is not the first project that has tried to change the way that science publishing runs but because it will be available to all areas of research and will have solid funding support it is likely to take over as the major platform for peer-review. The catch for independent research is that you will not be able to publish in epijournals unless you can submit to arXiv and that is not possible for everyone.

The scientists and mathematicians who are setting up the system do not seem to regard this as a problem. They believe that any serious researcher can easily find the endorser required to allow them access to arXiv, but as 1700 researchers who use viXra can testify this is not the case. At present about 15% of papers submitted to viXra are accepted in journals after peer-review, but this figure is likely to diminish to near zero if arXiv based journals take hold. To be fair Gowers has said that epijournals could allow linking to repositories other than arXiv. Whether they allow linking to viXra remains to be seen. My guess is that even if the epijournal infrastructure allows it, most individual journals will limit submissions to arXiv. In fact they may go further and only allow submissions from categories within arXiv that are related to the subject areas of the journal. This will reduce the overhead of having to reject too many papers that are off-topic and with near-zero budgets to work with this is going to be an attractive option. This could mean that even authors who find themselves limited to arXiv’s generic categories such as general maths and general physics may find themselves unable to submit to journals. I hope I will be proven too pessimistic but it seems to me that the writing is on the wall.

Why Does it Matter?

You may well ask why this matters. It is clear from the many discussions about open access on the internet that including publication access for all authors is not a concern for professional scientists. Much of the drive towards open access is being piloted by mathematicians and mathematics is rarely a controversial subject. Apart from a few rare cases such as the work of Godel or Cantor, mathematical progress is accepted very quickly. It is hard to argue with a proof. It is unlikely that any barrier could prevent a good work of mathematics from being recognized even if it came from an independent mathematician without the usual affiliations. But what about subjects more infested with the interference of politics? Take climate science as an example. Would it not be very tempting for the establishment to be able to undermine the work of climate skeptics simply by hindering their ability to publish? I suspect that journal editors will find it all too convenient that they can limit who can submit research by such artificial means. The wedge will be driven in further and it will become harder for scientists on the fringe to get the credibility they need from publication, or even to submit their work to someone who is at least required to read and criticize. Science is sleep walking into a Brave New World where anyone can speak but only the approved few can be heard. I think that those who are leading the fight for open access need to understand this now before it is too late. They must define open access to also mean openness for anyone to have access to the ability to submit for peer-review. At present their only concern is to remove the financial cost of access. Later they will see that such short-sightedness also has a cost.

22 Comments | Anti-Crackpots, Science Publishing | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

A Good Year for viXra

January 2, 2013

2012 was a good year for viXra so this is a good moment to provide some statistics.

This blog passed the 1 million view mark in December which is not bad considering the low posting rate and the length of time it has been running. Thank you all for your support.

Apart from the blog, the main part of viXra is the pre-print archive which we started in 2009 for scientists and mathematicians who experienced problems submitting to other archives such as arXiv. Since then it has gone from strength to strength as shown in this plots of paper upload and download counts. We now have over 4000 pre-prints online.

uploadstats

downloadstats

Uploads include papers from sciprint.org which was a similar archive that ran from 2007 until 2009 when viXra began in July 2009. The download stats have been filtered to remove indexing robots and multiple downloads of the same paper from the same IP address.

As you can see we had a record number of uploads in 2012 and downloads have been doubling year-on-year. This year by popular request we also started showing download statistics for individual papers with counts backdated from out logs. These can be viewed on the abstract pages. Our rival arXiv only provides a long list of excuses why they don’t provide a similar feature.

For those not familiar with viXra and those who don’t get what it is about, here are some bullet points:

  • viXra was created in 2009 for scientists who have issues submitting to other preprint repositories such as arXiv
  • It is run by its administrators independently of any organisation.
  • All submissions are free and unconditional. The site is funded by adverts (we no longer accept donations but thanks to all the past donors)
  • It is viXra policy to accept all submissions of scientific research.
  • We very occasionally reject submissions which contain personal attacks, adult material, too much repetition, copyright violations etc., but never because we disagree with the content.
  • We only accept works of science and mathematics. If you have works of literature, art, politics etc, there are other places to publish them.
  • Acceptance of papers into viXra does  not indicate any kind of endorsement or bestow any credibility or lack of credibility.
  • The sole purpose of viXra is to provide open access to scientific works with permanent links for reference and time-stamped records of version changes to allow for verification of priority.
  • viXra is not a peer-reviewed journal and as a mater of policy the administrators refuse all requests for feedback on submitted work.
  • Authors retain copyright and can also submit papers to journals for peer-review.
  • Each abstract page has a comment feature that anyone can use to provide feedback. Very few comments are deleted and never just because they are critical.
  • Most authors who submit to viXra are independent researchers who cannot submit to arXiv because of their endorsement policy that makes it impossible to submit if you do not have academic contacts willing to vouch for you. Potential arXiv endorsers are often unwilling to help outsiders because the arXiv threatens to remove their endorsement rights if they endorse work deemed inappropriate by the arXiv moderators.
  • viXra also contains work from people who are not independent of academic institutions. Some of them have found that they have problems with arXiv administrators who often move research that they don’t like to generic categories (e.g. general physics and general maths) In these categories you cannot normally cross-post to other categories and many indexing sites ignore them. The purpose of these categories seem to be to make unpopular research hard to find.
  • Despite the open censorship of scientific research most academics support the arXiv endorsement and moderation policies and believe that it only filters out research of no scientific value.
  • Although a significant number of papers in viXra are of low quality there are also many papers that have been accepted in peer-reviewed journals (estimated at 15% in one independent survey)
  • Our comparison of essays by viXra authors submitted to the 2012 FQXi essay contest which were independently rated, showed that the distribution of scores was similar to the overall distribution from all authors of which about a third were professional scientists who submit to arXiv.
  • Most papers that go against mainstream science are indeed as crazy as they seem, but there are numerous cases in the history of science where work was heavily criticized at first but later turned out to be right. viXra provides a place where any controversial work can be recorded and made available no matter where else it is rejected from. Even if such cases are very rare viXra would provide a service of value to science in this way.
  • Science does not just progress in giant revolutionary steps and viXra also contains many ordinary works of everyday science that find it hard to get published or accepted into other repositories.
  • Even research which contains many errors can nevertheless contain useful insights too. A good example from history was the work of Georg Ohm which was based on a very poor understanding of theoretical physics. Nevertheless it also contained a report of careful experiments that established Ohm’s law. Even papers that are seen to have many errors are worth keeping publically available in case they also have valuable ideas.
  • Even if many papers on viXra turn out to have little scientific value, at viXra we believe that everyone should be encouraged to think for themselves and be given the opportunity to learn by their mistakes. It is also the case that you can never predict what crazy idea may inspire someone else to think of something else of real value.
  • viXra is not “a way round peer-review” which is an important part of scientific evaluation. However, some scientists now agree that peer-review and publication should be formally separated. Traditional peer-review is often seen as flawed because of the role of publishing houses often motived by business interests. despite much discussion scientists and mathematicians have so far failed to implement a viable alternative to peer-review controlled by journals.
  • One other way to access the value of papers over time is by looking at citations. Sadly viXra is now censored by all services that count citations such as Google Scholar, InspireHEP, CiteSeer etc., so it is impossible to evaluate viXra papers this way unless they are also published elsewhere.
  • Despite the opposition from institutional science, we at viXra are encouraged by the support from our authors and will allow future historians to be our judge.

22 Comments | viXra news | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Christmas Rumour

December 25, 2012

[Boxing Day Update: Indication over at NEW are that this rumour is not being backed up by other ATLAS sources. Chances are it will melt away and we will never know its origins. Update: of course it could also be that the analysis has not been communicated to the whole team yet.]

A rumour has surfaced in the comments at Not Even Wrong that ATLAS have a 5 sigma signal (local significance?) in like-sign dimuons at 105 GeV. This plot shows the relevant events from an earlier analysis with 2011 data where a small excess can already be seen.

dimuon

First thoughts are of a doubly charged Higgs boson as predicted in Higgs triplet models with the potential to also explain the digamma over-excess in the Higgs decays. However, the signal is much weaker than expected for a doubly charged Higgs because CMS and ATLAS have already set lower limits around 300 – 400 GeV for H++. In a comment here yesterday on the digamma excess Frank Close pointed out that if a doubly charged Higgs is responsible for the digamma excess it should also affect the Bs to dimuon decay (see e.g. Resonaances) which is disappointingly inline with the Standard Model.

Of course the rumour could be incorrect or based on an analysis too preliminary to hold water, but if it pans out it will certainly pose an intriguing puzzle. A particle that decays to two like-signed muons must have lepton number two as well as charge two, unless the decay breaks lepton number conservation or there are missing neutrinos. It could be a spin two particle rather than a scalar. Working out what best fits other observations is not an exercise that can be done in the head, but it will be interesting to see what other first thoughts come out. It is also possible that this could be related to signals in multi-lepton channels that have been seen in the past (see e.g. Motl at TRF). Until we get an official report at perhaps Moriond 2013 this should not be taken too seriously. Some rumours evaporate during internal review and never see the light of day.

Merry Christmas.

38 Comments | Large Hadron Collider | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

End of Year Higgs Roundup

December 20, 2012

It has been a sensational year for particle physics with the discovery of the Higgs”-like” boson making front page news and cash stuffed awards going to some of the deserving scientists at CERN who made it possible. Congratulations to them and sympathies to the many people at CERN who were overlooked from the likes of Steve Myers and John Ellis down to the humble post-grad who was pictured falling asleep at the July announcement after having queued all night for his place.

Reuters reports that they will (maybe) finally be able to remove the “-like” at Moriond in March when the analysis of the full dataset is presented. With alternative spin and parity possibilities already ruled out with low to medium confidence many of us have already reached that conclusion. Serious doubters will wait for the self-couplings to be measured in twenty years time before conceding.

In the same Reuters report it is claimed that CERN scientists have “dismissed suggestions circulating widely on blogs and even in some science journals that instead of just one type of the elementary particle they might have found a pair (of particles)” Of course the truth is that every independent blog that has been following the developments has debunked the two-Higgs claim. This is the kind of no-thanks we have become used to for our efforts, Merry Christmas (Update: see comments). To add a little more credance , here is a plot made by merging two plots from the ATLAS conference note on the ZZ analysis.

ZZobsvs125

This shows the observed signal best fit for Higgs to ZZ decays (black dotted line) overlaid on the simulated one-sigma bands for a 125 GeV Higgs boson. This makes it clear that the observed signal is perfectly consistent everywhere with a 125 GeV Higgs within about one-and-a-bit sigma. It is only when they try to do a fit to this data that they get a discrepancy with other observations. Obviously the right conclusion is that it is too soon to do the fit because the error bands below 125 GeV are still widening too rapidly.

All the channels are now giving signals close to the standard model prediction for a Higgs around 125 to 126 GeV. Most of the new data is loaded into the Unofficial Higgs Combination Applet so you can roll your own, but here are the combined signals by channel at 126 GeV on a scale where 1.0 is the standard model cross-section, with statistical only errors

bb  :  1.24 +- 0.40

ττ :  0.4 +- 0.40

WW :  0.63 +- 0.21

ZZ : 0.99 +- 0.16

γγ : 1.77 +- 0.24

All of these are close enough to the standard model signal except perhaps the γγ where the discrepancy appears to be about 3.2 sigma but with systematic errors included this will drop to about 2.5 sigma. CMS have not yet updated this channel and rumours are that they see less excess. It seems daft that they have not released the results yet especially after the ATLAS delay turned out to be a fuss over nothing. Show us what you’ve got, please.

Here too is the unofficial global combination of high-resolution channels (ZZ, γγ) showing an impressive 9.4 sigma signal at 125.5 GeV and just noise everywhere else.

HiggshiresDec2012

Where does this leave us? Everything looks standard-model-like except the diphoton over-excess which may go away. If it stays there is a good chance that it will be explained by new particles such as a charged Higgs or vector-like fermions waiting to show up in other searches. If it goes we have the possibility of split SUSY or perhaps just the standard model at the LHC scale. Many models have been swept away leaving us to contemplate the implications of an unnatural little mass hirearchy. In one year our view of particle physics has moved on a long way. It’s just not clear which direction yet.

31 Comments | Higgs Hunting | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

LHC end of proton-run Update

December 11, 2012

This week marks the end of proton physics runs at the LHC. The last days are dedicated to machine development and in particular test runs at 25 ns. This shot shows the scrubbing runs during which they filled the collider to its full capacity for the first time. Record intensities of 270 trillion protons per beam were reached with 2748 bunches injected in 288 bunch trains with 25ns spacing. This doubles the intensity numbers used in the proton physics runs this year but it comes at a cost. In the pictures you can see how fast the beam intensity drops due to losses from the e-cloud effect. The purpose of the scrubbing runs this weekend was to clean out the e-cloud and improve beam lifetime. After nine runs the effect was significantly reduced but not fully removed. During the last few remaining days we may see some runs bringing 25ns beams into collision, but perhaps not at these intensities.

fills25ns

The point of these tests is to work out if and how the next runs can work at 25ns spacing rather than 50ns. That will happen when the LHC restarts at 13 TeV in 2015 after the long shutdown. We still have some heavy ion runs before the shutdown but otherwise it is going to be a long wait for new data.. During the LHCC meeting last week Steve Myres gave an overview of the main considerations for running at 25ns vs 50ns. You can watch the video from here. Myres revealed that other tests had shown that they can increase the brightness of the beams from the injectors by 50% using new optics. In addition to this the beta* in the next runs will come down to 0.5m or perhaps even 0.4m, so with all other things being equal luminosities could be three times as high. The problem is that pile-up with 50ns spacing is already near the limit of what the experiments can take. Switching to 25ns will half the pile-up making the situation much more tolerable. The other alternative would be to use luminosity levelling to artificially keep the luminosity down during the first part of any run.

This means the pressure to run at 25ns is high, it will make a big difference to the physics reach, but the technical issues get very troublesome. As well as the e-cloud problems which could mean losing maximum luminosity far too fast, they also have to worry about excess heating which has already been a problem with this years run forcing them to wait for things to cool down before refills. Another big worry is that UFO events become much more frequent at 25ns so even if they can maintain the luminosity they may keep losing the beams through unplanned dumps. Switching between 25ns and 50ns can lose a week of runs so they must decide which setting to use from the start of 2015 and try to stick to it. This makes the present 25ns tests very important. they had been planned for a few weeks ago to allow plenty of time but some injector problems set them back as explained by Myres in his talk. hopefully they will get all the data they need this week.

Meanwhile this week is also the occasion of the annual Cern Council Meetings. Remember that last year this was the event where they announced the first signs of an excess at 125 GeV in the Higgs searches. There are rumours coming in via twitter of new updates from CMS on Wednesday and ATLAS on Thursday (see calendar comments). There is nothing yet scheduled in indico that I can find apart from a status update on 13th (not physics) and the CCM open session on Thursday. We are still waiting for reports of the analysis using 12/fb at 8 TeV that were missing this year at the HCP meeting in Tokyo, especially the diphoton channel. In anticipation here is the latest CMS combo plot that has been around for a few weeks but which has not been much discussed.

CMS12fbThe peak at 125 GeV is clear but what about the excesses that continue up to 200 GeV? No doubt these are due to systematic errors and fluctuations that will go away, bur any new updates will be keenly awaited, just in case.

The LHC has now delivered 23/fb to CMS and ATLAS at 8 TeV of which about 20/fb will be usable data. The complete analysis could be ready in time for Moriond in March with the diphoton over-excess being the most likely centre of attention.

Update: Indications are that the CMS and ATLAS updates were cancelled.

Update: Peter Woit thinks that ATLAS will give new diphoton and ZZ results at the LHC status meeting tomorrow. Meetings with this title usually indicate technical updates on the running of the collider and its experiments, not new physics results. It looks a lot like they are trying to spring a surprise by stealth 🙂 A presentation later at KITP confirms that they are planning to talk. It still seems that CMS are not ready to give their diphoton update but they do have a status update.

24 Comments | Higgs Hunting, Large Hadron Collider | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Colliding Particles

December 7, 2012

You may be familiar with the series “colliding Particles” of short films by Mike Paterson about the search for the Higgs boson covered from some unusual angles. After a break he is back adding some more. Number 10 is about the role played by bloggers (the good parts).

collidingparticles

If you have not already seen them take a look through the earlier ones. There are lots of very good explanations.

1 Comment | Higgs Hunting | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

FQXi results

December 5, 2012

Congratulations to the winners of the FQXi essay contest “Questioning the Foundations” . The results show an impressive and diverse range of ideas about common assumptions that need to be questioned to progress with foundational physics. This was the fourth contest of its type run by the FQXi institute. These provide a unique opportunity for professional and independent physicists to cross words in a public forum about this kind of subject. I know there will always be criticisms of the results and the imperfect voting system but the contest is still a very worthy exercise. This year there were 272 entries, significantly more than previous contests so the top 36 from the community voting who made the final cut should be extra proud of their success, even if they were not among the final winners. This year I narrowly missed out of joining them but there were many other good essays that did not make it either so there is no need to feel out of it. Taking part and having a chance to air our views on physics is much more important than winning. One last word of congratulations goes to the Perimeter Institute since the vast majority of the winners had strong connections with the centre, such as being past or present researchers there. The Perimeter Institute is well-known for its research on foundational issues so their success here is not surprising. They should also be applauded for their culture which seems to encourage taking part when many professional scientists from other centres are too shy to try it.

The winning essay entitled “The paradigm of kinematics and dynamics must yield to causal structure” was written by Perimeter Institute theorist Robert Spekkens. The idea of questioning the separation of kinematics and dynamics is very original. I never thought of it in this context myself even though I had previously made a similar point in a physics.stackexchange answer about a year ago. Spekkans goes on to link this to causality and the use of POSETs (Partially ordered sets) in models of fundamental physics. This aspect of his essay is a perfect example of what my essay on causality is against. In my view the concept of temporal causality (every effect has a cause preceding in time) is not fundamental at all. It is linked to the arrow of time which emerges as an aspect of thermodynamics. It is not written into the laws of physics which as we know them are perfectly symmetrical under time reversal (or more precisely CPT inversion). I therefore question why it needs to be used in approaches to understanding the fundamental laws of physics. My point did not go down well with other contestants and Spekkens was not the only prize winner who advocated the importance of causality as something to preserve while throwing out other assumptions. Of course this just makes me more pleased that I choose this point to make, winning is not what matters.

Aside from that there is something else about the contest that is of special interest on this blog. According to my count exactly 50 out of the 295 authors (17%) who wrote essays have also submitted papers to the viXra archive. The number who have submitted papers to the arXiv is 95 (32%). This provides a rare opportunity to do a comparative statistical analysis on range of quality of papers submitted to these repositories. By the way 11 of the authors can be found in both arXiv and viXra (including myself), leaving 161 authors (54%) who have not used either. The authors who use arXiv are mostly professional physicists because the endorsement system used by Cornell to filter arXiv submissions makes it difficult, but not impossible for most independent scientists to get approval, so we can conclude that about a third of the FQXi contest entrants are professionals. However I am more interested in what can be learnt about viXra authors.

I started viXra in 2009 to help scientists who have been excluded from the arXiv, either because they do not know anyone who can act as their endorser or because the arXiv administrators have specifically excluded them. Many people at the time said that viXra would only support crackpots and this opinion persists in many places. When someone wrote an entry for viXra on Wikipedia some administrators actively campaigned (unsuccessfully) to have it deleted calling viXra a “crank magnet” and concluding that it had no scientific value. Last month the wave of censorship even reached Google who suddenly removed all viXra entries from Google Scholar. We only had about 3% of our hits coming from there so it was not such a great loss, but it leaves us with no way of tracking citations of viXra papers which is a great disservice. This development reflects the opinions of many professional scientists who have said that viXra at best provides no value to science and only serves to keep crackpots in one safe place. Some are even less charitable and believe that it only promotes bad research and is harmful to science. Are they right?

When viXra was launched I said that it would also serve as an experiment to see if arXiv’s moderation policy was excluding some good science. Nobody should be surprised that there is a lot of bad quality research on viXra because it does not have any filtering and makes no claim to endorse its individual contents (personally I am of the opinion that even bad research can have value as a creative work and may even contain hidden gems of knowledge), but does it nevertheless have work of high value that would otherwise be lost? A recent paper by Lelk and Devine submitted to both arXiv and viXra tried to carry out a quantitative assessment of viXra in comparison to arXiv. It found that 15% pf articles on viXra were published in peer-reviewed journals (based on a very low sample). This may sound low but you should take into account that many independent scientists are less interested in journal publications because they do not need to produce a CV. In any case 15% of 4000 papers is a non-negligeable count if you do think this is a good measure of value.

How else then can the value of viXra by assessed if the papers are not being rated via peer-review? One answer is to use the ratings of its authors as provided by the FQXi contest. Essays in the contest were rated using marks from the authors themselves. This is not a perfect system by any means. There were essays that were placed either much lower or much higher in the results than they deserved. Nevertheless, the overall ranking is statistically a good measure of the papers quality in the terms demanded by the contest rules, with mostly good papers ending up at the top and bad ones at the bottom. It can therefore be used to collectively analyse the range of ability of the authors using either arXiv or viXra.

Let’s start with arXiv whose authors have been endorsed and moderated by its administrators. Given such filtering it is easy to predict that they should do well in the contest. Here is a graph of their placings counted in ten bins of about 29.5 authors. The lowest rated essays are in bin 1 on the left and the highest are in bin 10 on the right.

FQXiarXiv

As expected the majority of arXiv authors have made it into the top bins. 87 were ranked in the top half and only 17 in the lower half.

How would you expect the distribution to look for viXra authors? If we are indeed all crackpots as many people suggest then the distribution would be the opposite with most authors doing badly and hardly any making the top bins that are dominated by the arXiv authors. Here is the actual result.

FQXiviXra

In fact the distribution is essentially flat within the statistical error bars (not shown) and there are plenty of viXra authors who did well. In fact six viXra authors made the final cut.

What should be concluded from this? If someone is identified to you as an author who submits papers to viXra how should you judge their status? Is it justified to assume that they must be a crank with no useful knowledge because they apparently can’t get their research into arXiv? The answer according to this analysis is that you should judge them the same way you would judge a typical author who has submitted an essay to the FQXi contest. They may not be good but they could be of a similar standard to the authors who submit papers to arXiv. I don’t suppose this will change the opinions of our critics but it should. Google are happy to index FQXi essays on Google Scholar so why should they refuse to index viXra papers?

By the way, of all the essays that were written by viXra or arXiv authors, the one that got the lowest rating was an essay by a Cornell professor who has four papers on arXiv. I let you judge.

101 Comments | Prizes, viXra news | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

The Particle at the End of the Universe: Review

December 3, 2012

Somebody kindly offered me a review copy of Sean’s book in the comments so to encourage others to do likewise I shall offer my opinion of “The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the  Higgs and the Discovery of a New World” by Sean Carroll.

The book I got was actually a virtual one which has the advantage of being searchable so the first thing I did was check to see if I got a mention. Apparently this blog (or rather its comments) turns out to be the place where the 125 GeV rumour first arrived on the internet. It is not what I would have chosen to be mentioned for but it’s better than nothing I suppose.

After a year of Higgs madness that swamped the media there will be plenty of people wanting to read more about it, so Sean has done well to get this book out in time for Xmas with the full story (so far). There is an obvious list of questions about the boson that people would like to ask and Sean conveniently answers them all chapter by chapter. Sean has been answering these kinds of questions on blogs and usenet before blogs for a long time, so he is pretty good at it, but explaining what the Higgs boson is and does in general terms is notoriously difficult. Sean does his best with a mixture of analogies and more direct explanations. Whether he succeeds would have to be judged by someone who does not already know the answers but I think it would be hard to do much better than this book.

There were two chapters that I found especially interesting. The first was about the thorny question of the Nobel prize for the Higgs. I compiled a list of contributions to the Higgs prediction a while back, but Sean goes one better by fleshing it out with the full story. It is very balanced and will be essential reading for the Nobel committee next year, but they will have to find their own solution to who gets the prize.

There is another side to the story of the Higgs discovery that sets it apart from previous discoveries in physics. It happened in the age of the blogs and social media. Sean is well placed to talk about the impact this had and his chapter about nit is the second one I liked a lot.

So overall it is a very good book. Enjoy.

17 Comments | Higgs Hunting, Review | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Higgs at HCP2012

November 14, 2012

This morning ATLAS and CMS reported new Higgs results at the Hadron Collider Physics Conference in Kyoto. Only a subset of the available decay channels have been updated. The crucial diphoton channels in particular have not been updated by either experiment. This may be due to increased difficulties in doing the analysis with possible issues over systematic errors and mass/energy calibration. Obviously the systematics get more significant as the statistical errors diminish. The earlier diphoton update at 8 TeV from ATLAS already showed some signs of inconsistency with the excess peaking at around 127.5 GeV compared to lower estimates of around 125.5 GeV from CMS. We will have to be more patient which they sort it out.

However, there have also been some sensational new updates. Both CMS and ATLAS have provided new results from the ditau decay mode showing an excess of 0.72 +- 0.52 times the standard model at 125 GeV in CMS and 0.7 +- 0.7 in ATLAS.  A crude combination gives 0.71 +- 0.42 times that standard model. This agreement with the standard model using 17/fb in each detector overturns earlier results from CMS in July where the signal seemed a little on the low side.

In the ZZ channels CMS have shown a useful update that extends the mass range up to 1 TeV with no signs of any excess anywhere other than the known 125 GeV. Although this only works directly for the standard model it is also a bit of a blow for models with a second ordinary Higgs in this mass range.

29 Comments | Higgs Hunting, Large Hadron Collider | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Evidence for a charged Higgs Boson?

October 12, 2012

Last week Upsala was home to a specialised HEP workshop about the search for a charged Higgs bosons. Such particles are predicted in some beyond standard model theories such as supersysmmetry. There is not much direct evidence yet for such charged scalar bosons but the searches as described at the workshop have not looked beyond the 2011 data using 5/fb at most. There is still a lot of room left for them to appear.

The best hope for BSM observations in the data so far comes from anomalies in the Higgs decay rates. In particular the decay to two tauons has not been observed where expected and the rate for decay to two photons is too large. In my opinion the tau decay is not a very convincing discrepancy yet because the stats are low, especially because ATLAS has not yet done the analysis with 2012 data. The diphoton excess is also not fantastically convincing with a combined significance of about 2.2 sigma according to Joe Incandela (CMS spokesperson) but it has persisted since 2011 and is seen by both ATLAS and CMS. It is probably too big to be explained by theory errors from the analysis of the standard model so some BSM explanation is a real possibility. Both observations will be considerably clarified at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto next month.

Meanwhile there is little to stop theorists thinking about what could account for such anomalies if they turn out to be real. This is not just idle speculation. Any theory that might explain the anomalies could make unique predictions for new physics that could prioritize the searches to help the collaborations home in on new physics more quickly. This is crucial to plan future accelerators.

The diphoton decay channel is especially sensitive to new physics because the basic Higgs boson is not charged. Photons only interact with charged particles so the Higgs can only decay to photons via loop diagrams that include massive charged particles. We know of several such particles in the standard model and the ones that contribute the most in this case are the W bosons and the top quark. If you know anything about the type of Feynman diagrams involved you will know that bosons and fermions in loops interfere deconstructively. In this case the W bosons have the larger amplitude and the top quark reduced it by about 40%. This means that to increase the decay rate and explain the tentative excess you would need to postulate the existence of (at least) a new heavy charged boson, such as a charged Higgs scalar. It has to be heavier than about 105 GeV otherwise it would have been observed at LEP, but upper limits depend on its properties.

As it happens there are phenomenologists who are too skilled at their job so that they can explain the excess in many other ways, e.g. using “vector-like” fermions or a fermiophobic Higgs or even just QCD corrections. I am simply going to be skeptical and suggest that they are thinking wishfully about their pet theories. To the unbiased mind the new charged boson is the most obvious explanation for an excess. That still leaves open the question of what spin ( and other properties) the boson has. A spin one charged boson would have to be very similar to a W gauge boson and would mediate new forces. The limits on such new particles is already good.  Higher spin would make it a charged graviton. Let’s not go there.

Another major parameter for a new particle to determine is its lepton number. If the particle had lepton number one (like a scalar lepton) then its R-parity would be odd. All standard model particles have even R-parity so if lepton number is conserved our mystery particle would either have to be stable or decay to another new stable particle. Heavy charged particles are easy to detect and lighter stable particles would be hard ot miss at the LHC. ATLAS and CMS were designed with missing energy searches in mind so that they could look effectively for supersymmetry. Indeed a scalar tau would be a good candidate except that SUSY searches have already gone a long way to exclude them.

So there are many possible explanations for the diphoton excess, if it is real physics, but the scalar charged boson with zero lepton number is the simplest case that still has a good chance of being around still. Any such scalar charged boson would immediately be identified as a likely charged Higgs if it was found.

Coming back to last weeks workshop, it is good to see that the charged Higgs as an explanation for the diphoton excess was indeed the subject of a talk. The speaker Stefano Moretti concentrated on the Higgs triplet model which has charged and doubly charged Higgs bosons. The doubly charged Higgs would be particularly effective in explaining the diphoton excess because doubling the charge quadruples the extra cross-section since there are two gamma vertices. Of course some next to minimal SUSY models have a similar feature. Here is the set of Feynman diagrams involved

With so many contributions all adding to the diphoton excess the charged Higgs can comfortably be heavier than limits set by direct searches so far. Soon we will get more information with a better determination of the excess and better charged Higgs searches. The 2012 data at 8 TeV will be much more penetrating than the 2011 data heavy new particles and by now we have three times as much of it. Of course this story could go in many directions from here. The diphoton excess may fade or be explained by better standard model calculations. It might even be some systematic error symptomatic of a less than perfect understanding of the detectors. If it does hold up there are lots of new physics possibilities, but if I had to put my chips down at this point I think the charged Higgs has the best odds all things considered.

51 Comments | Large Hadron Collider, Supersymmetry | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

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