Large Hadron Collider Could Be World's First Time Machine, Researchers' Theory Suggests
ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2011) — If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year -- could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.
Illustration of singlet time travel theory. When a pair of protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, the resultant explosion may create a special type of particle, called a Higgs singlet, that is capable of traveling forward and back in time. It would do so by leaving familiar three-dimensional space to travel in an extra dimension. (Credit: Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt)
"Our theory is a long shot," admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints."
One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.
According to Weiler and Ho's theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
"One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."
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Causality-Violating Higgs Singlets at the LHC
(Submitted on 7 Mar 2011)
We construct a simple class of compactified five-dimensional metrics which admits closed timelike curves (CTCs), and derive the resulting CTCs as analytic solutions to the geodesic equations of motion. The associated Einstein tensor satisfies the null, weak, strong and dominant energy conditions; in particular, no negative-energy "tachyonic" matter is required. In extra-dimensional models where gauge charges are bound to our brane, it is the KK modes of gauge-singlets that may travel through the CTCs. From our brane point of view, many of these KK modes would appear to travel backward in time. We give a simple model in which such time-traveling Higgs singlets can be produced by the LHC, either from decay of the Standard Model Higgses or through mixing with the SM Higgses. The signature of these time-traveling singlets is a secondary decay vertex pre-appearing before the primary vertex which produced them. The two vertices are correlated by momentum conservation.
Comments: 40 pages, 4 figures
Subjects: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
[v1] Mon, 7 Mar 2011 20:55:11 GMT (411kb)