Hidden Higgs and more!

First some trivia. A fortnight ago after reading my blog, Dr. reacted by asking me to seek some counselling from the university counselling services. I remembered this now because last week one of the graduate student here was sent home packing, apparently after having some psychiatric or perhaps depression related ailments. This coincided with my reading of a book titled "The beat of a different drum". It's a biographical sketch of the person, who I admire the most - Richard Feynman. In Feynman's own words - "A person who seeks counselling should first get his/her head tested". Nature is wily. If you are not crazy at times then you don't have a beautiful mind. How crazy ? That's debatable!

This article , I thought was something very interesting. It speculates the existence of dark energy, due to the interaction of neutrinos with hitherto unknown particles called accelerons. Everything sounds perfect, including the nomenclature. All the new particles should necessarily end with the suffix "ons"! However, I should remind the reader not to get worried too much after reading the article, with the nomenclature. If you think "decelerons" would have been an equally good alternative choice, then - welcome to the club. Others may seek counselling! Neutrinos were first conceived theoretically by Wolfgang Pauli in 1931, in a last attempt to save energy and momentum conservation principles being violated in certain forms of radioactive decay. However it was Enrico Fermi who coined the term "neutrino" in 1934, using Pauli's hypothetical particle to explain beta decay in radio-active elements and thereby developing a comprehensive theory for the first time. But the mass of the neutrino was assumed to be zero or very very small till recently. The importance of neutrinos in the context of Cosmology is due to the enormous value(10[9]) of the ratio of the number density of neutrinos(includes all the three varieties - the electron neutrino, the tau neutrino and the muon neutrino) to that of Baryons(protons and neutrons together). That means even a tiny mass of the neutrino can correspond to a substantial contribution to the closure density(the Omega term corresponding to neutrinos) of the universe. It was previously assumed that this could somehow contribute to the dark matter(both or either of the two, non-relativistic cold dark matter and the fast moving hot dark matter) in the universe.
Why in the first place the neutrinos should have mass? Because of oscillations. That is, one kind of neutrino can transform into the other kinds(one or both subsequently) and back. This is not possible if they have a zero mass or same mass. Hence the conclusion - neutrinos have non degenerate masses corresponding to the non degenerate eigen-states. People have performed various experiments to put an upper bound to the neutrino mass and that turns out to be 1.0 eV. Since it's a very small mass, measurement is difficult, making it very inaccurate. However experiments are underway, using tritium decay, promising to yield fairly accurate numbers. Now let me break the ice. A very recent paper authored by Dr. and myself, tries to explain dark energy using the Hidden Higgs Conjecture .

The idea is fairly simple. We assume a minimally coupled scalar field called the cosmological Higg's field interacting with itself and decaying quickly, giving rise to a constant dark energy from a fairly early period of time. A straight forward extension of this idea will give an effective mass of the neutrino to the order 10[-10] eV. This is much smaller than 1.0 eV. But you should remember that this is an effective mass which will be lot lesser than the rest mass of a free neutrino. The pdf file of the detailed calculation will be posted here as soon as I finish typing it. So any decaying scalar field (you may call it accelerons or Cosmological Higgs) is sufficient to achieve an acceleration. The only difference being, that when you consider neutrino interaction as the accleration is accomplished, the neutrino density is diluted. As a result the coupling gets weaker and so the expansion may eventually slow down. On the contrary if you do not consider the neutrino factor you always end up getting a constant acceleration.
My only reservations about the whole idea is about the choice of coupling constants. Should we take two Lambda terms corresponding to the particle-particle and field-particle interactions. The worry aspect in this scenario would be that there can be a large number of unknown terms in the Lagrangian. Still it won't be a bad idea to asume multiple coupling terms and redo the analysis with some good guesses(experimentally motivated). In brief the whole point was to incorporate the neutrinos into the "Hidden Higg's conjecture".
Lack of motivation and extreme heat(particularly in my office) were the causes I was concerned with last week. I don't know why sometimes it's like that. So I turned my attention to drumming. I feel that drumming is a good exercise for improving your concentration. The conga drum is basically a Helmholtz resonator (physics wise). Towards the end of the week, I think it was on saturday I helped a physics graduate student shift his apartment. After which I couldn't move my arms and the upper body for nearly two days. That's why the blogging got delayed. So this week it's a Monday blog!