Big bang on toast? I’ve got 5 dimensions on a pancake.

14Feb08

This morning I had a chuckle at a piece of satirical news,”Athiest Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast.” However, armed with leftover frosting from my Gingerbread-[Feyn]men, I decided that I could go one step further. Ladies and gentlement, I present to you five-dimensional Higgsless electroweak symmetry breaking… on a pancake!

I tried to include a reference, but unfortunately it was the wrong reference. I meant to say hep-ph/0308038. (Also, I may have my gauge groups a bit off… I think I meant SU(2)_R\times U(1)_{B-L} on the UV brane and SU(2)_R\times SU(2)_L on the IR brane.) The idea is to use a warped extra dimension, rather than the Higgs mechanism, to induce electroweak symmetry breaking. The image was inspired by C. Grojean’s talk at the 2008 Higgs-Maxwell meeting yesterday.

I had leftover batter, so I decided to continue with the EWSB theme and sketch a plot of the dominant Higgs decays as a function of Standard Model Higgs mass:

The pancake is a bit burnt along the X-axis, but what’s plotted is the Higgs mass. The b\bar{b} mode is a bit harder to tag than the WW mode, with a transition at m_H = 140Gev. Thus a heavier Higgs will be easier to discover at the LHC. The other modes plotted (not to scale!) are \tau\bar\tau (green), ZZ (yellow), and t\bar t (red).

Shrove Tuesday, a.k.a. Pancake Day (in the UK) was last week. I had been planning to try out a new crepe recipe then, but was delayed until today. Why don’t we celebrate Pancake Day in the US? I guess we have pancakes often enough?

Anyway, this opens the door to all sorts of physics/pancake jokes. I’ll just offer this funny paper title: arXiv:astro-ph/0509039, “Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil.”


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