UK to make all publicly funded research open access

July 17, 2012

A few months ago the UK government announced that it wanted all UK research that is funded from public money to be available through open access. Now they have told us how they plan to do it. They will pay the journals a fee for each paper they publish.

In the traditional publishing system journals charge people to read a paper, or libraries are charged a fee to hold copies of the journal. In recent years this has moved largely to electronic systems but the principle remains the same. In some cases the authors may pay the journal a fee for their work to be available to everyone for free, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Now UK researchers will have to use the open access system for all their publications if it is publicly funded. This has to be a good thing because it will make the research more widely available, but how will it alter the dynamics of research?

According to an article in the New Scientist the UK government has set aside 1% of research budgets to pay the open access fees, but the fees are estimated to be £2000 per article. This means that there will be enough to pay for one publication for every £200,000 spent on research. This does not sound like very much, especially in subjects like theoretical physics where many papers are produced by doctorates and post doctorates who dont cost much. Is it enough? Will the money be distributed unevenly with theory departments getting much more of it? Let’s look at it another way. The total amount they have allowed for to pay for the fees is £50 million. At £2000 a paper that is enough to pay for 25,000 papers each year. So how many research papers does the UK produce each year. The answer is at least 100,000 and perhaps several times that. Clearly it does not add up. So how will the system shake out? It will be interesting to see.

9 Comments | Science Publishing | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Guest Post by Felix Lev

July 17, 2012
Today viXra log is proud to host a guest post by one of our regular contributors to the viXra.org archive. Felix Lev gained a PhD from the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Moscow) and a Dr. Sci. degree from the Institute for High Energy Physics (also known as the Serpukhov Accelerator). In Russia Felix Lev worked at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna). Now he works as a software engineer but continues research as an independent physicist in a range of subjects including quantum theory over Galois fields.

Spreading of Ultrarelativistic Wave Packet and Redshift

In standard cosmology, the red shift of light coming to the Earth from distant objects is usually explained as a consequence of the fact that the Universe is expanding. This explanation has been questioned by many authors and many other explanations have been proposed. One of the examples – a recent paper by Leonardo Rubio “Layer Hubble and the Alleged Expansion of the Universe” in viXra:1206.0068.

A standard explanation implies that photons emitted by distant objects travel in the interstellar medium practically without interaction with interstellar matter and hence they can survive their long (even billions of years) journey to the Earth. I believe that this explanation has the following obvious flaw: it does not take into account a well-known quantum effect of wave-packet spreading and the photons are treated as classical particles (for which wave-packet spreading is negligible). The effect of wave-packet spreading has been known practically since the discovery of quantum mechanics. For classical nonrelativistic particles this effect is negligible since the characteristic time of wave-packet spreading is of the order of ma2/ℏ where m is the mass of the body and a – its typical size. In optics the wave-packet spreading is usually discussed in view of the law of dispersion ω(k) when a wave travels in the medium. But even if a photon travels in empty space, its wave function is a subject of wave-packet spreading.

A simple calculations the details of which can be found in my paper viXra:1206:0074, gives for the characteristic time t* of spreading of the photon wave function a quantity given by the same formula but with m replaced by E/c2 where E is the photon energy. This result can be rewritten as t* = 2πT(a/λ)2 where T is the period of the wave, λ is the wave length and a is a dimension of the photon wave function in the direction perpendicular to the photon momentum. Hence even for optimistic values of a this quantity is typically much less than a second.

If spreading is so fast then a question arises why we can see stars and even planets rather than an almost isotropic background. The only explanation is that the interaction of photons with the interstellar medium cannot be neglected. On quantum level a description of the interaction is rather complicated since several processes should be taken into account. For example, a photon can be absorbed by an atom and reemitted in approximately the same direction. This process is an illustration of the fact that in the medium the speed of propagation is less than c: because after absorbing a photon the atom lives some time in an excited state. This process plays an important role from the point of view of wave-packet spreading. Indeed, the atom emits a photon with a wave packet of a small size. If the photon encounters many atoms on its way, this does not allow the photon wave function to spread significantly.

In view of this qualitative picture it is clear that at least a part of the red shift can be a consequence of the energy loss and the greater the distance to an object is, the greater is the loss. This phenomenon also poses a problem that the density of the interstellar medium might be much greater than usually believed. Among different scenarios discussed in the literature are dark energy, dark matter and others. As shown in my papers (see e.g. viXra:1104.0065 and references therein), the cosmological acceleration can be easily and naturally explained from first principles of quantum theory without involving dark energy, empty space-time background and other artificial notions. However, the other possibilities seem to be more realistic and now they are intensively studied.

44 Comments | Cosmology | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Global combination gives unofficial Higgs discovery with 2011 data.

July 10, 2012

Warning for allergy sufferers, this post contains multiple sigmas 🙂

When ATLAS and CMS first published their results based on 2011 data in December, an unofficial combination of the results gave an excess with significance 3.74 sigma, a long way short of the 5 sigma needed to claim a discovery. Adding the Tevatron results available at that time only made it worse with a drop to 3.69 sigma. In February CMS added some extra diphoton events that pushed the LHC combination up to 4.3 sigma, then at the Moriond conference on March both CMS and ATLAS updated their combinations with the result that the significance dropped to 3.64 sigma. At the same meeting CDF and Dzero presented an update using the full dataset from the Tevatron. This time the combination with the Tevatron data improved the result pushing the significance back up to 4.25 sigma.

With all the data in use it looked like new data from the 2012 LHC run would be needed to reach discovery significance. Three days before the ICHEP conference the Tevatron collaborations presented updated combinations using some updated analysis from Dzero. This pushed the significance of the global combination up to 4.39 sigma. Then of course ATLAS and CMS added their 2012 data to reach 5.0 sigma individually with the combination reaching an impressive 7.45 sigma.

Later when the data was published as analysis notes more detail was given including data for the diphoton and 4 lepton data at 7 TeV. These had been updated yet again with ATLAS improving their analysis technique and CMS finding an extra 0.33/fb of 2011 data. Using these a new unofficial combination for the 2011 data can be generated and the result is dramatic. The LHC combination jumped from 3.67 sigma to 4.64 sigma while the global combination with all the 2011 data jumped from 4.4 sigma to 5.27 sigma. Even taking into account the error margins for the unofficial combination this means that the global combination has risen to discovery level significance level based on 2011 data alone, an impressive result.

So where did this increase of nearly 1 sigma from the 2011 data come from? Looking at the individual contributions, the CMS combination increased by 0.35 sigma and the ATLAS combination increased by 0.85 sigma. Of course all these results are approximate, unofficial and not endorsed by the experiments.

You can generate all the combinations here using the unofficial Higgs combination tool.

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

Who will/should get the Nobel Prize for the Higgs Boson

July 9, 2012

With the discovery of the Higgs Boson now in the bag it seems inevitable that someone will be getting a Nobel prize for it but who? There may even be two prizes, one for the theory and one for the experiment, but I think it more likely that only one prize will be awarded. Peter Higgs and François Englert seem dead certs but the committee can choose up to three living physicists. Will there be a third man and if so who? If you want a reminder of the history my earlier chronology of contributions may help.

The physics prize can only be given to living indivduals (unlike the peace prize which can be given to an organisation) so if they want to honour CERN they will have to give it to an individual representative.

So let’s have a poll. Actually let’s make it two. Assuming that I am correct about the first two laureates who else do you think should get the prize because they deserve it, and who else do you predict will get it.

By the way I don’t think that the prize will be awarded this year because nominations needed to be in by the 1st January, unless some nominations were made based on evidence from last year.

Update: After a day of voting the clear leaders after “no thrid person” are Anderson, Evans, Goldstone and Kibble.  Any of these would be a worthy winner and it is just unfortunate that the others (including Kibbles collaborators) would be overlooked. I don’t think the rule of three will be changed but you have to wonder what will happen when a collaboration of four make a ground breaking discovery.

It is not unlikely that a separate prize will be given for the experiments. I sense that CERN are promoting Lyn Evans as the one who lead the LHC especially as he has now come back to take on the difficult task of leading the ILC project. In this case people will argue about whether the Tevatron also deserves recognition for their contribution. That will be another difficult question that could be conveniently dodged by splitting a prize across the discovery of top and the Higgs . The theory prize for the top prediction was given in 2008 to Kobayashi and Maskawa.

There were some suggestions for others as follows:

  • Peter Higgs – someone did not read the text
  • Phil Gibbs – you are too kind, LOL
  • any of a number of passed over theorists
  • Eridtoto – who?
  • Al Gore – I didn’t know he read this blog
  • Jesus – if this is a God particle joke Moses would have been marginally less lame
  • me – Al, you can only vote once.

39 Comments | Higgs Hunting, Prizes | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Timelapse video of the Higgs Boson Discovery plot evolution

July 8, 2012

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

Post-Higgs LHC Update

July 7, 2012

Just because the Higgs has been discovered does not mean there is any rest the the physcists at the LHC. They are now a few days out of the technical stop and have already returned to running with maximum bunch numbers (at slightly reduced intensity for now) and have added 0.33/fb, and they have done some special runs for TOTEM.

The CERN directorate would not feel that they are doing their job if they did not change the plan at least three times a year, so at the 4th July press conference the DG announced that they had decided to run the LHC for an extra three months and then shut down the collider for a longer period of two years. It will not restart at higher energy until 2015. There will be about 2 months extra proton physics this year which could add another 5/fb to 10/fb to the total delivered. The hope is that it will give enough data to study the properties of the Higgs and perhaps find something else so that the physicists have plenty of analysis to work on during the two year break while the LHC and the detectors are being upgraded. For more details see the ICHEP talk here

16 Comments | ICHEP, Large Hadron Collider | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Are unofficial Higgs Combinations “Valid” ?

July 5, 2012

The Unofficial Higgs Combination Tool has now been updated with all the new Higgs plots released in the last few days, including the Tevatron updates and the new 8 TeV data from the LHC. There will probably be more to add on 7th and 9th July from ICHEP. Feel free to play around with it.

At the CERN press conference yesterday the Director General Dr Rolf Heuer warned journalists about unofficial combinations. What he said exactly was at follows (It is 26:50 in if you are looking on the recording):

“The fact that they [CMS and ATLAS] have not yet combined their results today is that they did not have enough time. We should have shifted the Melbourne conference by 2 weeks or 3 weeks or 4 weeks but that was not possible. You have to stay tuned until at some time they combine their results. Whatever combination you get beforehand is unauthorised and is certainly not valid because you have to take into account the different correlations, one has to be very careful.”

I agree with what he says. The unofficial combinations you find on this blog are approximate and unofficial and should be used with caution. I have always made that clear. It is not just the correlations that are neglected. The quick combination method assumes that the statistical errors have a flat normal distribution and that is not quite correct. The detector collaborations don’t provide detailed likelihood data to outsiders so this is the best I can do. Luckily all statistical errors tend towards the normal Gaussian as the quantity of data increases (central limit theorem) and in most cases there is enough data for the results to be good, with a few exceptions.

Whether the combinations are “valid” or not depends on what you are using them for. I don’t consider them valid for writing up published results of any kind, but they are good enough as a rough guide to theorists looking for possible signals in the data and there is nothing wrong with showing them at conferences as some eminent theorists have already done, provided they come with appropriate caveats.

I have previously shown some comparisons between official combinations and my unofficial ones to show how accurate they can be (or not). I think it is worth doing a few more now using some of the recent results where the amount of data has increased. In all the plots below the red line is the official result and the black is the unofficial. First up is the latest version of the Tevatron combination compared with an unofficial combination of the updated Dzero and the latest CDF plot that was updated in March. You can click on the plots to get a larger version.

The combinations across all channels have always worked quite well because they use lots of data. The last time that the LHC provided an official combination for ATLAS + CMS was in November when there was only 2.3/fb. here is how it looked next to the unofficial combination that I had done 10 weeks earlier.

Notice here how the accuracy gets worse at higher energies where there is less data available. Heuer seemed to be implying that there should be another combination due out soon. If so it will be interesting to see if the comparison improves as I would expect.

The combinations for single channels have been less successful in the past, but now they are improving. Here is a reconstruction of the ATLAS combination for 7 TeV + 8 TeV data in the diphoton channel

But the results don’t always come out so well even now. The 4 lepton channel uses very few events in both the signal and the background. Here is the result of a similar combination (Update: There was an error in the digitisation that I now fixed and it is not so bad now)

The combination across ATLAS and CMS should be better because it involves twice as much data. They should also have twice as much again by the end of the year so by then combination should work OK even in this channel.

If you want to try more the Higgs combination tool is easy to use and free.

Update: I said that I dont think these combination methods should be used in published papers but other theorists are apparently not as reticent. arXiv:1207.1347 is one example of  paper showing a combined signal plot as well as combined channel values and other fits. There conclusion is that everything fits the standard model except that the diphoton rate is 2.5 sigma too high, in agreement with my figure.

40 Comments | Higgs Hunting, ICHEP | Permalink
Posted by Phi G

Congratulations, It’s a Boson

July 4, 2012

Congratulations, It’s a Boson. Have you thought of a name yet?

CERN have happily announced the arrival of a new Boson but so far are being a bit cagey about what to call it. Is it the Higgs? Their caution as experimenters is perfectly laudable. They should show that they are keeping an open mind, but theorists are independent of the process of discovery and do not need to be so reticent.

The facts are that the boson discovered with a mass of about 125 GeV or 126 GeV interacts with a wide range of particles in exactly the way the Higgs boson should. Its decay modes to Z, W, b and tau have just the right ratios and its production has also been tested in different ways confirming indirectly that its coupling to the top quark is also about right. Its spin could be 0 or 2 but 0 is much more likely. All these features point to the standard model Higgs boson.

The only fly in the ointment is its decay rate to two photons. This is nearly twice as large as expected. The significance of the discrepancy with the standard model is about 2.5 sigma. It could be a fluke. We have learnt to show some healthy skepticism when it comes to observations of physics beyond the standard model. However it is also consistent with an enhancement due to the presence of another charged boson. If that boson exists it must have a mass at least a bit larger than the W otherwise the Higgs would decay to this particle in pairs and we would see the effect on the other decay rates. It can’t be too massive otherwise it would not enhance the diphoton rate enough. But it is likely to be possible to find a range of masses and properties that is consistent with all the observations.

So it is not necessary to invoke any properties for the observed boson that are any different from the standard model. Separate new physics will suffice. So the observed boson passes several tests required by the Higgs and I think that it is reasonable to assume that  is indeed the Higgs boson until some observation suggests otherwise. It will always be possible to think of other models that could fit the facts, but they are not likely to be quite as economical as the standard model. It would be a disservice to the theorists who provided the theory 50 years ago if we continue to refuse to acknowledge the clear nature of this discovery when there is no evidence to the contrary. They predicted it would be just like this and It is the Higgs boson. Congratulations to all the experimenters and theorists who made this dream come to life.

Update: Here is the global Higgs combination. Is that conclusive enough now?

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

Higgs Live + viXra Combinations

July 4, 2012

A year ago I started to get fired up about the prospects for the Higgs boson discovery as it become clear that the Large Hadron Collider was performing so well that they would either find it, or prove that it does not exist, at least not in the form most expected. We had three major progress updates from the LHC last year with the amount of data being analysed doubling each time bringing better and better signs that a signal was emerging from the noise. At first the heavier ranges for its mass were ruled out. Then, in December the last major announcement left many theorists such as myself cautiously optimistic that the Higgs boson has finally been glimpsed in its last refuge at a mass of about 125 GeV. Officially the physicists who speak for the experiments have remained cautious but now they have enough data to settle the matter conclusively. This years initial runs of the proton accelerator have already delivered as much collision data as it produced last year, and CERN has announced another meeting to update the figures once again.

Rumours have spread that the new data contains the same signal seen before by both the large detectors CMS and ATLAS that have been searching for the Higgs boson at the collision points of the Large Hadron Collider. If this is true then it is just possible that either or both of the teams that run the detectors will be able to tell us that they have seen a signal with the 5 sigma significance required to claim a discovery. If they don’t reach that goal individually, the combination of the two almost certainly will.

As I write the auditorium at CERN is letting in the physicists who have been queueing all night for their place. Several will be live blogging from there but I will be reporting from home using the live webcast.

Is 5-sigma necessary for a discovery?

We have been assuming that a discovery announcement would require a level of significance of 5 sigma equivalent 30 a one in 3 million chance of the signal happening as just a background fluctuation is there is really nothing there. This morning some of the live bloggers are playing down this requirement which suggests that they might not reach 5 sigma but that the overall levels of significance could be considered sufficient. We will see what they actually say shortly.

08:55 Higgs applauded as he takes his seat

09:00 DG opens the meeting

Incandela, CMS spokesman starts with pile-up slide. Pile-up could be an excuse for any anomalies.

8:24 Far too much detail for time allowed 😦

8:30 Amazing signal from combining 7 TeV + 8 TeV in diphoton channel for CMS

They have used 5.5/fb from 2012 data.

Here is the exclusion plot

4lepton also looks good. Combined significance is 5 sigma! = Discovery

WW looks OK too, only 8 TeV not combined with 7 TeV

Mass of Higgs is 125.3 += 0.6 GeV, combined significance 4.9 sigma

All channels consistent with SM but diphoton a little enhanced

8:53: Now starting the ATLAS presentation

Diphoton channel for ATLAS also showing a distinct signal. They get 4.5 sigma combining 2011 with 2012, used 5.9 sigma

Signal is nearly twice the standard model

Even in the 4-lepton channel the signal looks clear on the evnt plots

3.6 sigma in this channel

In combined channels ATLAS reach 5 sigma at 126.5 GeV = discovery!

Interesting that the mass value is still a little inconsistent with CMS.

Both experiments are showing exvess anove standard model in diphoton channel. This is even nore exciting than the discovery

DG says “I think we have it, do you agree?”

“We have a discovery, a particle consistent with the Higgs boson”

Now I have to combine those diphoton channels to see how significant the excess really is, BRB

11:47 This is what DG warned you against…

The combined diphoton plot gives a 6 sigma signal. It is 2.4 sigma stronger than the standard model.

This is what the signal plot lokks like. Rememner the grenn line is the standard model level, red line is background level

I will refine these when I have clearer plots to work from

The slides are now online.

13:44 I have been occupied with other things but will add some more combos later. There are lots of plots to digitise,

14:10 For those patiently waiting here is the unofficial combination for ZZ to four leptons. Significance is an impressive 4.6 sigma

The signal plot shows that in this channel it matches perfectly the standard model Higgs

For completeness here is the combination of the two low resolution channels across ATLAS+CMS.  This one gives 7.4 sigma

Notice that we have now eliminated any possibility of a second boson nearby, unless they are too close to separate.

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

Leaked video indicates strong Higgs signal

July 3, 2012

Now that the results from the Higgs searches really have been seen by the teams of physicists from CMS and ATLAS we can expect a few rumours that might be based on fact. They start with this leaked video with CMS spokesman Joe Incandela talking about what they have seen. There is a strong signal from the diphotons and something weaker in four-leptons. As predicted here he is being careful with his wording to say that they have discovered a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson but further observations are required to know more details. There is no talk of discovery here but he seems to believe that the results might indicate that new particles are within reach of the LHC.

Video was pulled just after I viewed it.

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

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