What the Madala boson is NOT

Searching for a new hypothetical particle (PART 1)

Wait a second! I haven't said yet what the Madala boson is. Maybe you think I'm starting my blogs backwards. That might be true. But recall that I'm a PhD student, so I'm quite used to going backwards...

The chances are, if you are not a particle physicist interested in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, the jargon and technical details of the particle physics community could leave you more confused than educated after reading about physics results. I thought it would be helpful to address three different points that seem to be the biggest stumbling blocks in understanding the Madala hypothesis (based on what I've found from my own colleagues).

1. The Madala boson is NOT... the 750 GeV di-photon excess

Bear with me here, this might not be as obvious as it seems.

With a risk of oversimplifying particle physics, I will say that particles are discovered as "bumps" on a spectrum (for a deeper look into particle physics, I highly recommend the crash course on particle physics, expertly made by our friend @lemouth). Usually one can draw a graph representing the mass of collections of particles that are measured by a detector. Then you can plot what the graph would look like if there are no new particles (this is called the background). This is a predicted plot, either mathematically or by a clever manipulation of the data. On top of this, you can plot what the actual data shows. Surely, if the data deviate from the background, it would indicate that something is there that we couldn't predict as the background -- could it be a new particle?

This has happened a few times over the last few years. The most famous of these was the discovery of the Higgs boson, a true particle that has been proved to exist in nature. The most infamous was the false-positive non-discovery of the so-called "750 GeV di-photon excess". At the end of 2015, both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented results in the search for a particle decaying to a pair of photons (much the same as the discovery of the Higgs boson, which can disintegrate into a pair of photons). To everyone's surprise, both ATLAS and CMS showed plots with deviations from the background at around a mass of 750 GeV. In the plots below, you can see visually what I mean. On the left is what ATLAS initially saw at the end of 2015, and in the green circle, you can see the black dots (the data) deviate from the red line (the background). It was shown with more data, on the right, that this was actually not a new particle, but a statistical fluctuation.

Plots come from: Physics Letters B, Volume 775, 10 December 2017, Pages 105-125 (under CC BY licence)

Before the "particle" was disproved, the result got the physics community quite excited. Literally hundreds of papers were written about hypothetical explanations for the new particle (I don't know the exact number, but I'd love for someone to enlighten me in the comments :D). And as it so happens, even I wrote a relatively light hearted short paper based on a hypothetical treatment of the 750 GeV excess. I won't bore you with the details, but the paper essentially tried to link what we knew about the Madala boson (at the time) with the hypothetical addition of a particle with a mass of 750 GeV. This short paper was presented to a local workshop in South Africa, and so several people got the idea that the Madala boson is closely linked to the false-positive 750 GeV excess. I want to make it clear that it is NOT! All in all, the experience taught me to think more carefully about what I should and shouldn't present, because once something is on the internet, it's difficult to get down...

2. The Madala boson is NOT... an explanation for Dark Matter

Speaking of presenting false information to the public, I will now direct your attention to part of what gave the Madala boson some bad press.

On the 9th of September 2016, a premature press release was made about the Madala boson. Most of what the article said was correct, and no bold claims were made about whether or not the particle was real or had been discovered (recall it has not been discovered yet). This ultimately led to the official CERN Twitter account tweeting the following:



Tweets aside, the press release mentioned that the Madala boson could be an explanation for the elusive nature of Dark Matter. Dark Matter is one of the great unexplained mysteries of contemporary physics. No matter who you are, you've probably heard about it. It's quite a popular topic in the media, and also in pop culture. So, when the press release was made about the Madala boson possibly being connected to Dark Matter, the implications of the new hypothetical particle were blown out of proportion by all sorts of people, ranging from popular science bloggers to conspiracy theorists (you think I'm joking? just for unrelated fun, Google "CERN Mandela effect". it's always a good laugh).

The reason the press release placed emphasis on Dark Matter is as follows. In our early studies, we were really interested in the production of the Higgs boson in association with something else. What else? We didn't know at first... So, as scientists do, we assumed the simplest possible case: Dark Matter particles. This case is simple because Dark Matter does not interact with normal matter very often, and so it wouldn't be detected in particle detectors like those at the LHC. Since then, we've started to gain much more of an understanding of what kinds of things we are actually looking for, and Dark Matter doesn't yet fit into the hypothesis.

Perhaps one day we might find a possible connection to Dark Matter, but at the moment it doesn't look like we will...

3. The Madala boson is NOT... a self-consistent new "theory"

Doing science most often takes on one of two forms: theory and experiment. "Theory" refers to hypothetical ideas that are built using a language like mathematics. "Experiment" refers to one looking at empirical data and trying to discern a natural pattern. Fortunately, theory and experiment are connected -- in fact, science requires that they are. This means that crazy ideas cooked up by theoretical physicists can be validated by experimental data, and that, if interpreted correctly, the data could also inspire new ideas.

With regards to the Madala boson, we are almost exclusively doing the latter. That is, based on the experimental data, we think we can explain certain anomalies using a theoretical model. The model is by no means perfect from a theoretical point of view, but at least it can explain the data.

As an analogy, consider learning a new language. At first, when you hear the words, it seems random, and you might think it's impossible to understand. But the more you listen, the more you start to identify certain common words, where sentences begin and end, and maybe even the accent of whoever is speaking it. In other words, from the data you can start to determine patterns, even without understanding the well established grammar. At this point, you could read a textbook to help you understand. But as anyone who's learnt a new language can relate to, only by speaking the language will you ever gain a true understanding of it.

We are at step 1: looking at the data and trying to determine patters. Hopefully soon we can start to work on the underlying theory (the "grammar") of the Madala boson.

This is quite a subtle point if you don't specialise in particle physics, so I will save the technical details for a future blog post. But I will maintain that the Madala hypothesis should be developed and criticised in the realm of experimental physics, not theoretical physics. Should a discovery be made, then the details of the underlying theory really can be ironed out. Until then, we will continue interpreting the data and improving the model.

So stay tuned for my next blog, where I will start to explain exactly what it is that makes the Madala boson unique, and why a bunch of us here in Johannesburg think we're onto something!

Sorry this blog post has come so late... life got very busy. But I'm excited to finally start blogging!

Thank you for reading!
Stef