Full disclosure: the author of the paper I am about to offer for consumption is a friend and colleague. Our paths have crossed professionally once, when he and his then colleagues at UC Davis explored the consequences of some new physics ideas on the decays of Upsilon mesons. These theoretical studies became the basis of about half the proposal I helped co-author which set BaBar on the course for collecting the world’s largest samples of Upsilon(3S) and Upsilon(2S) mesons. His ideas were also tested by the Belle collaboration, earlier in 2006, in a smaller sample of Upsilon(3S) mesons.
That said, I thought I’d recommend some reading for the holidays as you get on planes and bundle up late at night, feeling guilty about going to sleep rather than thinking about physics. Well, here you go – the solution to your OCD: emergent electroweak gravity.
In short, the paper I am recommending [1] goes something like this. What if gravity is not a force to which we should fit all of our understanding of the universe, but instead a consequence of things we already understand about the universe? Specifically, what the author (McElrath) observes is that weakly interacting relics from the Big Bang have been around for so long, interacting so little, that their wave functions have expanded beyond size of the space between any two of them. This means that, like electrons in a cold conductor below the critical temperature, they are in a superfluid state.
When you have electrons in a cold conductor, where most of the electrons in the conductor are in filled atomic shells and thus below the Fermi surface for the material, the conduction band electrons can weakly bond through phonon interactions and form “Cooper pairs”. It was Cooper himself who first observed that ANY such particle in that state, with ANY attractive interaction (no matter how weak), can exhibit this phenomenon. This idea became foundational in understanding superconductivity.
In this paper, McElrath argues that relic neutrinos with their expanded wave functions do experience just such a weak, attractive force through the exchange of a Z boson (the specific manifestation in this case of the Kohn-Luttinger effect). In that case, they must form bound states that are bosonic. One of these he identifies as having properties identical to the graviton. It’s an intriguing idea.
Have safe travels during this holiday season, and take the time away from the humdrum of reviews, ROOT ntuples, and endless meeting after endless meeting, to curl up with a good idea. This might be one of them.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.2696
