- About Us
- People
- Undergrad
- Graduate
- Research
- News & Events
-
News by Year
- 2022
- Physics Professors named Canada Research Chairs
- Physics Faculty and Graduate Student Win Teaching Awards
- SFU Physics Professor wins 2021 Buchalter Cosmology Prize
- Dr. Hayden's Research in SFU Scholarly Impact
- Karen Kavanagh selected as a Fellow of the MRS
- Applied Physics undergrad wins AMPP Poster Competition
- Physics BSc Grad Gives Convocation Address
- Dr. Simmons Appointed to Quantum Tech Expert Panel
- Physics Undergrad wins SFU Service Award
- Meet the Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Tech
- Dr. Sivak's Research Featured on NSERC Impact Story
- Physics Grad Wins Dean's Convocation Medal
- First-year Physics major wins John Pearson Prize
- Higgs Boson turns 10!
- SFU Physics BSc graduate wins 2nd prize in the CAP Congress Competition
- Physics members win ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Award
- SFU Physics Research featured in Quanta Magazine
- Silicon Quantum Lab Publishes Major Breakthrough
- Biophysics Research Featured on Scholarly Impact
- Levon Pogosian wins BC Sugar Achievement Award
- Dr. Simmons on SFU's Quantum Computing Breakthrough
- John Bechhoefer named Distinguished SFU Professor
- 2021
- Simmons wins Women of Distinction Award
- Pogosian's Research in SFU Scholarly Impact
- PhD Graduate Awarded Convocation Medal
- Convocation Speaker Aidan Wright
- Nancy Forde Elected BSC President
- Bechhoefer named Royal Society of Canada Fellow
- Jeff Sonier Named American Physical Society Fellow
- SFU undergrads receive quantum grant award
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
- 2022
- Events by Year
- Events By Category
-
News by Year
- Outreach
- _how-to
- Congratulations to our Class of 2021
- Archive
- Atlas Tier 1 Data Centre
Colloquium
Macroscopic Length Scales, the Higgs Boson, and Cosmological Evolution of Fundamental Parameters
David Kaplan
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University
Macroscopic Length Scales, the Higgs Boson, and Cosmological Evolution of Fundamental Parameters
Dec 08, 2017 at 12PM
Synopsis
In this talk, I present the Higgs Boson's Compton wavelength (proportional to its inverse mass), as currently one of the few fundamental length-scales in physics, from which much of macroscopic physics is derived. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts a direct relationship between the Higgs mass and the mass of all other fundamental particles, but it fails to predict the mass of the Higgs itself. In fact, the Higgs mass is a conundrum in the Standard Model, as simple (and very reasonable) scaling arguments predict it to be sixteen orders of magnitude bigger! I will summarize many of the approaches to this problem (dubbed the 'hierarchy problem') and show that they all represent a single class of ideas. I will also summarize a second type of idea that relies on anthropic arguments and the existence of a multiverse. Finally, I will present a new approach that explains the smallness of the Higgs mass (and thus the largeness of atoms) as a result of cosmological evolution of parameters, and suggest that this fundamental scale in physics may have been a result of self-organized criticality in the early universe.