On 12/14/2012 12:04 PM, Warren Smith wrote:
I think their reasoning is something like the following. They presume that a large fraction of the "mass" of the new particles is not mass per se, but rather is effective mass due to interaction-energy with the all-pervading Higgs scalar field. It is this "Higgs mechanism" that allows the W and Z vector bosons to have effective mass even though in Yang-Mills theory they necessarily have zero mass, thus rescuing and enabling Yang-Mills theory to be physically real.
Their point: given this is the cause of the new particles having most of their mass, the Higgs is going to have something to say about that. If it were assumed to have enormous interactions, then the Higgs ought to have enough-altered physics we would have seen that, which we do not. So I think their idea is: if the new particles had small masses we would have seen them. If they had large masses due to Higgs effect, we would have seen Higgs bosons alterations that we do not. Therefore, there are no more kinds of new particles, QED.
I do not know whether I believe this, and may be incompetent to decide. But it is an interesting line of reasoning. And the effects of this line of reasoning could be devastating to numerous theories of particle physics.
But I see an obvious huge problem. We know that new particles must exist because of "dark matter" which has been detected gravitationally and outweighs the normal matter in the universe. If this mainstream view is correct, then this new paper yields an immediate proof that 1=0.
I think that is the reasoning, but it may leave sterile (right-handed) neutrinos as the viable candidate for dark matter. Brent