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Indian scientist exposes Achilles heel of Standard Model

M I Khan in Bhubaneswar

A scientist based in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, Afsar Abbas, claims that the Higgs particle, a hypothetical heavy, electrically neutral, subatomic particle may not exist after all.

Dr Abbas, of the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, made this assertion in two papers he also presented at the International Symposium on Particles, Strings and Cosmology, held at Lake Tahoe, California recently.

Abbas has been included in Marquis Who's Who 2000.

He, along with his son Samar Abbas, a research scholar at Utkal University, has also been internationally acknowledged for their discovery of 'Dark Matter' of cosmology being the cause of mass extinctions.

They had said that that earth could have encountered dense clumps of dark matter -- invisible subatomic particles that make up most of the mass of the universe -- in space that could have heated up the planet's interior. This heat could have lead to huge volcanic eruptions that might have possibly caused mass extinctions including, perhaps, those of the dinosaurs.

In the mid-1980s, some scientists postulated that if dark matter is uniformly distributed throughout space, Earth could snag about 1018 particles per second.

The father and son duo claim that if this is the case, so much dark matter would accumulate in the core that they'd begin to collide with normal matter and get destroyed, increasing the heat in the lower mantle.

And if, as some others claim, dark matter isn't uniformly distributed, but lies in patches across the universe, the scientists claim an encounter with one could generate heat enough to cause hot magma to well up from the lowest regions of the mantle.

"As the Higgs particle (or boson) is extremely significant in modern physics, I have been trying to understand it at a deeper level for several years," he says. "In the last one year or so I slowly realised that it cannot be a physical particle," Dr Abbas said, after returning from the conference.

In the currently favoured Standard Model of particle physics, the 'Higgs mechanism' is not too well established. And that is the area Dr Abbas attacks.

He claims all experimental information today confirm his predictions.

He says that the standard model has been so successful that some workers have ignored it's basic structure.

"We should not forget that this model has directly or indirectly already fetched so many Nobel prizes," he says. "The Higgs (boson) is the only missing piece" he says.

Back in 1989-90, Abbas deduced that the standard model, in contrast to popular expectation, had electric charge quantization built into it. His investigation to the question that whether electric charge was there right from the time of Big Bang which created the universe, led him to conclude in negative.

"There was no electric charge present in the early universe," he wrote in his paper. Electric charge, a basic property, arose much later in the evolution of the universe, he said.

Abbas took it further. He said the superstring theories that have gained currency don't hold much water and that they are intrinsically flawed and inconsistent.

Abbas who got his PhD from Rutgers University and has worked as a scientist, among other places, in US, Germany, England, is confident that with adequate infrastructure from the concerned authorities in the govt, he can throw more light on the subject.

RELATED LINKS:
The Standard Model
Slides of Abbas's talk
Higg's particle, in simple terms
No Higgs particle at all

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