Can you think of any?
Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another one: the claim that applied research and real technological advances very often spring from basic research with no specific technological goal. Faraday wasn’t thinking of electronic gizmos when he helped pioneer modern electromagnetism, and the inventors of quantum mechanics weren’t thinking of semiconductors and lasers. They just wanted to figure out how nature works, and the applications came later.
So what about contemporary particle physics, and the Higgs boson in particular? We’re spending a lot of money to look for it, and I’m perfectly comfortable justifying that expense by the purely intellectual reward associated with understanding the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. But inevitably we also mention that, even if we don’t know what it will be right now, it’s likely (or some go so far as to say “inevitable”) that someday we’ll invent some marvelous bit of technology that makes crucial use of what we learned from studying the Higgs.
So — anyone have any guesses as to what that might be? You are permitted to think broadly here. We’re obviously not expecting something within a few years after we find the little bugger. So imagine that we have discovered it, and if you like you can imagine we have the technology to create Higgses with a lot less overhead than a kilometers-across particle accelerator. We have a heavy and short-lived elementary particle that couples preferentially to other heavy particles, and represents ripples in the background field that breaks electroweak symmetry and therefore provides mass. What could we possibly do with it?
Specificity and plausibility will be rewarded. (Although there are no actual rewards offered.) So “cure cancer” gets low marks, while “improve the rate of this specific important chemical reaction” would be a lot better.
Let your science-fiction-trained imaginations rome, and chime in.
Mass-production…
Warpdrive. All else is secondary to that imho. Although as inbetween step the nuclear fusion option could provide the energy needed for that, so yeah. First nuclear fusion, then warpdrive.
Seriously, I could use a vacation on Risa.
We already have the first commercially successful spinoff of the Higgs search: Brian Cox.
Could you use it to determine if we’re in a metastable vacuum or not? If so, maybe you could futz with it and destroy the universe!
Society needs investment in Exploratory Engineering.
Eric Drexler: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQHA-UaUAe0
…or the practical application of the Higgs Boson could be that it is never discovered and therefore forces us to rethink our model of the universe!
Well I am not sure, but it seems if we can use the knowledge of how Higgs works to increase mass. This may be a bit simple but perhapse we would be able to increase and decrease the mass of say the body and frame of a vehicle, this could save lives in the event of a car accident or even a plan crash. Also perhaps by generating a field around an airplane, car or spacecraft to reduce the surrounding mass enabling such a vehicle to use much less fuel and travel at great speeds due to less resistance. Lastly there is always a chance we will build a giant mass generator in space that will allow space craft to travel through and be shot across the universe like a bullet from a gun by reducing mass in the direction you want to go and increasing in at the same time increase the mass behind it.
Based on past history, the most useful spinoffs are likely to be the technologies invented and/or refined in order to be able to measure the Higgs Boson, from large-scale engineering feats to crunching enormous piles of data and everything in-between.
Many valuable applications are not the direct result of a discovery or project; they are products of the need to solve new problems in order to achieve the discovery or accomplish the project.
I believe Davros said it best “The destruction of reality itself!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7SByM_Mctw
Would help increase chances of funding if you said you were researching a “Reality Bomb” 😀
For the people who want to vary the mass of objects by controlling the Higgs field… Subatomic matter particles can be divided into leptons (like electron and neutrino) and hadrons (like proton and neutron). In the standard model, the mass of the leptons comes directly from the Higgs. But for the hadrons (made of quarks) it’s different – the individual quarks get their mass from the Higgs field, like the leptons, but most of the hadron’s overall mass comes from QCD effects (see comment #17 in this thread) – i.e. other objects inside it, like gluons and virtual (anti)quarks.
Also, the size of the quark or lepton mass comes from the strength of its “Yukawa coupling” with the Higgs field. The Higgs field has a constant nonzero strength throughout space (the value that minimizes its potential energy), so all those quarks and leptons are encountering a Higgs field of the same strength. Their masses differ because they respond to it differently – the electron couples weakly, so it has a small mass; the top quark couples strongly, so it has a large mass. So if you could somehow cut the Higgs field’s strength by half, the masses of all the elementary particles would also drop by half. For the leptons, that just means they’d be lighter by half, but for the hadrons, the effect would be a lot weaker, because most of the mass is in the QCD effects. Even if you set the mass of up and down quarks to zero, the proton doesn’t become that much lighter.
So the immediate consequence of somehow adjusting the baseline value of the Higgs field would be to change the balance of forces in the nucleus and especially in the atom (i.e. electron-nucleus interaction). The masses of the proton and neutron (and of the pion which binds them) would all shift in some complicated way, that would change the atomic lifetimes and decay patterns, or which might even make the neutron stable. Similarly, if the electron becomes lighter or heavier, that will change the size and properties of atoms, and hence it will screw up chemistry.
More challenging is to ask how you could even go about changing the value of the Higgs field across a region of space; because at every point, the self-interaction dynamics of the Higgs field will be trying to restore it to its usual minimum value. I really don’t know how this would work – maybe if you had an ultra-high-energy “Higgs laser”, powered by some enormous astrophysical process, you could create a beam within which the Higgs field was kept at a value away from its minimum. But how would you produce a Higgs laser?
There are some papers from around 1990 on the coherent production of Higgs bosons in RHIC-style collisions. Now consider the concept of an “atom laser”, a coherent beam of superposed atoms that can be emitted from a Bose-Einstein condensate. Suppose you directed two ultrarelativistic atom lasers at each other – could that produce a Higgs laser? Something for the people who calculate the properties of Dyson spheres and other megascale engineering projects to study…
better lift and support on Earth
I will weigh in with the mighty opinion that as soon as you go beneath the planck level , it’s turtles all the way down baby!
On a slightly more realistic note, The premise of this column, “What will the Higgs particle lead to?” is a leading question, which is a logical fallacy. As of now, there is no ‘Higgs’ particle discovered , and thus no properties concerning its illustrious nature are known. To be speculating about such a poof of nothing based on nothing is beginning to make Six Day Creationism look plausable in comparison.
I make an easy prediction,
The Higgs particle will have exactly the same properties and mass as Bullshit when it is discovered, and will smell and taste just about the same too. On the bright side, it might make excellent fertilizer. On the down side, I think you wont be getting any new HEP toys any time soon as the governments of the world can’t afford to keep buying this kind of plant food.
I make an easy suggestion,
You might want to start considering the contingency question “What will you do if you don’t find the Higgs Boson? How far back are you going to have to start winding until you find where you went wrong?” Just saying, an awful lot of very very expensive eggs are all in one basket, you might want to diversify your physics portfolio.
UFOs ?
Seems like you could create a universal resistor. Sort of like how they use Bose-Einstein condensates to slow photons, but for any massed particle at (hopefully) any temp. Also, prob good for lensing, like further focusing beams on a target (for laser induced fusion, or very high powered microscopes, or even very clear telescopes).
Sean asks what one can do with a large number of Higgs particles. I agree with nonnormalizable – not much.
The Higgs lives for 10^-25 seconds, so beams are impossible. In fact, couldn’t one ask the same question about Z bosons? I know of no realistic applications of Z’s (although the desire to study them and the Higgs did lead to the World Wide Web, but I think Sean isn’t asking about technological spinoffs, of which there could be many). Since the field is a Bose condensate, it won’t be possible to “locally change” the value of the condensate, so many of the above ideas aren’t feasible. One can always imagine bizarre phenomena outside the Standard Model, but that isn’t the question.
What about restoring the symmetry? All one needs is an energy density of (300 GeV)^4, which is roughly 10 orders of magnitude higher then RHIC. I suppose it is thinkable in the distant future, but this “bubble” would be unstable and would disappear quickly. Energy is conserved, so I can’t see how you could use it for anything. Energy can’t be extracted from a Bose condensate.
But I’m over 40, so my brain is obviously over the hill, and maybe others can think of something. I’ve seen nothing in this comment thread yet…
New Brains for humans. The “technology” of our new brains, while not direectly invented by any one of us, will be a direct result of finding evidence for a Higgs particle. If the evidence for the Higgs is strong, and the Standard Model thus not refuted by the LHC experiments, the most important technological innovation will be in the way human brains experience the universe during the accessible future. That change in the human brain state will lead to a new “culture”. Culture is the entity in which individual humans and their thoughts/behaviors are embedded – meaning remain individually recognizable, but inseparatable from the whole. The new human brain state created by a cultural familiarity with a well tested standard model will create new ways for the people who develop that brain state to engage with the material world. Those ways will cause them to create innovations in how we live our lilves, and the tools we use to do it. It will also cause them to find new ways to define the cosmos we inhabit, leading to the next phase of our cultural evolution. To paraphrase Kevin Kelly, it’s “What Technology Wants”.
Brownies!
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2551
In building the LHC and its detectors, scientists and engineers had to design and implement a broad range of new techniques and systems. So while finding the Higgs might not have any immediate implications, the new technologies and techniques that come out of the search will. For example, one group associated with CMS came up with a way to mass-solder tiny pin-connectors while achieving a connection resistance more than 5 times lower than using leading industry techniques.
Also, the analysis methods used in the Higgs search are pushing our boundaries both computationally and mathematically. Researchers are constantly trying trying out new computing techniques so they can process more and more data in the same fixed window (the year only has so many days). The statistical techniques used by the researchers are new enough that the people they’re named after are still at the conferences to debate what the results mean.
So finding the Higgs won’t give us anything useful in the foreseeable future, but the toys we pick up along the way sure will.
Can the Higgs provide an adequate-for-comic books explanation for how The Hulk and Giant Man gain and lose mass when they transform? Marvel has never even tried. ~:O
*puts sci-fi hat on*
Send out a small higgs probe towards that doomsday asteroid — the probe can increase its mass “on demand” and can gravitationally alter the asteroid’s orbit to move it out of Earth’s way. Existing techniques just don’t seem to cut it — we need a very early warning (probably a couple of years) to be able to launch one such probe and then more time for the probe to “move” the asteroid out of our way.
*sci-fi hat gets blown away by wind*
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“Tractor Beam” (or really, gravity field) could be one potential. If we can concentrate HB’s in an area we can generate mass and therefore “artificial” gravity – assuming we can manipulate the placement, the mass can move and therefore act like a tractor beam to some nearby object (like an Earth-destroying asteroid). Or perhaps offer a distortable gravity field to bend space-time and permit faster-than-light communications. This might make for some kind of hyper-quantum computing (I want credit for that phrase when this becomes reality!).
Creating the mass effect. It will help us to place mass relays on clusters all over the galaxy. It will help us travel just like the Normandy does.
As a guy who makes his living doing oncology research, I’m just glad you’ve agreed not to solve our problems for us, and thus put me out of work. Carry on.
Oh, come on, what kind of serious question is that? :/
I’d like to say anything realistically, but that wouldn’t satisfy anyone on any resolute level, and saying observing other things at this point that seem unobservable is just a can of worms and not specific enough. The effects of finding the god damned thing are just the obvious ones to me, anyway. Getting to places and seeing other things in parts of phase space or whatever space you’d like to observe becoming locally observable? Seeing the multiverse in a real, local sense, maybe? Taking pictures of every non-local event that happens at any given moment would be an awesome one involving every kind of unobservable particle or what have you locally, I think you might agree too.
(I wonder if there are pictures of vaccum energy…)
God. It was so open ended I fell through with 72 + other people. *starts laughing*
@Robert: I was going to get to that one…But we already did it.