entropy

Perspective
Quo Vadis Particula Physica?
Xavier Calmet

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK; x.calmet@sussex.ac.uk

Abstract: In this brief paper, I give a very personal account on the state of particle physics on the
occasion of Paul Frampton’s 80th birthday.

Keywords: standard model; quantum gravity

It is a pleasure to contribute to this Special Issue on the occasion of Paul Frampton’s

80th birthday. I got to know Paul in 2004 when I moved from Caltech to UNC-Chapel Hill
to take a postdoctoral position in his group. Paul very kindly came to knock at the door of
my apartment on the day I arrived in Chapel Hill after an exhausting but amazing four and
half days of driving from Pasadena to Chapel Hill. He took me to his place to have a chat
and to show me the pictures of all the Nobel prize winners he had interacted with. I will
never forget that Paul told me on that day that he had proposed so many extensions of the
Standard Model of particle physics that he was bound to be awarded the Nobel Prize as
one of his new particles would certainly be discovered at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). This was in 2004. The LHC discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. We are now in 2024
and sadly Paul is still waiting for the discovery of one of his particles and his prize. It is by
now very unlikely that the LHC will be able to produce particles that are not part of the
Standard Model, assuming they truly exist, at least not on-shell, see, e.g., [1].
To some, this lack of new physics beyond the Standard Model in the TeV region may
not have been a surprise. My father, who was trained as a theoretical particle physicist in
the 1960s, told me many times that his decision to move to computer science was strongly
influenced by a discussion with Sheldon Glashow who was advocating in the 1970s the idea
of a grand desert between the weak scale [2], i.e., the energy scale of the Standard Model,
and the scale of unification at some 1016 GeV. My father, who was working on the heroic
Citation: Calmet, X. Quo Vadis multi-loop calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon [3–5], became part
Particula Physica? Entropy 2024, 26, of a small group of people who developed the field of computer algebra that was needed
366. https://doi.org/10.3390/ to perform these tedious calculations. He started a new research group in Grenoble in the
e26050366 mid-1980s, formally quitting physics and his original lab at Luminy in Marseille. He finally
Academic Editor: Oleg Lunin moved to the University of Karlsruhe, now KIT, in 1987, having accepted a professorship
in computer algebra. There, he developed some contacts with the local particle physicists.
Received: 4 April 2024 In private, he would laugh at their effort to automatize Feynman diagram calculations in
Revised: 21 April 2024
non-Abelian gauge theories including renormalization: he had done all these things in
Accepted: 24 April 2024
the 1970s and simply did not bother to publish them as they were trivial given his work
Published: 26 April 2024
on quantum electrodynamics. He had a very fulfilling career as a professor in computer
science, never regretting having left physics.
What happened to physics since the 1970s? Well, first of all, people in the 1970s were
Copyright: © 2024 by the author.
too smart for the sake of my generation. The Higgs mechanism had been proposed by
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Peter Higgs [6,7] and embedded by Steven Weinberg in Sheldon Glashow’s electroweak
This article is an open access article model [8]. Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann had proposed what turned out to be
distributed under the terms and the correct theory for strong interactions (see, e.g., [9], for a review). Gerardus ’t Hooft and
conditions of the Creative Commons Martinus Veltman had shown [10] that these non-Abelian theories are renormalizable and
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// thus mathematically consistent at all energy scales. This work enabled ’t Hooft to show that
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ Yang–Mills theories can be asymptotically safe, long before the minus sign controversy and
4.0/). the following dilemma of attribution [11]. Sadly, for theorists trying to extend the Standard

Entropy 2024, 26, 366. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26050366 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy

Entropy 2024, 26, 366 2 of 6

Model, experimentalists have found one particle predicted by the Standard Model after
another, with the discovery of the Higgs boson being the last and final confirmation of the
Standard Model.
Some will argue that neutrino masses are a clear sign of the breakdown of the elec-
troweak Standard Model, but this is not something I find convincing. Neutrino masses
are easily accounted for by the Standard Model if the Yukawa couplings between the
left-handed neutrinos and right-handed neutrinos are not set to zero in full analogy to
up-type quarks. There was never any real reason to set them to zero, besides the fact that
their masses were compatible with zero given the experimental state of the art in the 1970s.
I would see neutrino masses as a prediction of the Standard Model, because of the close
analogy in the treatment of leptons and quarks in this model, rather than new physics.
To a certain extent, this is a semantic question, but neutrino masses are not a theoretical
challenge whichever point of view one takes.
As Glashow foresaw, it is thus conceivable that the Standard Model remains valid up
to some very high energy scale, for example, the scale of grand unification, and threshold
effects [12] could easily lead to the numerical unification of the gauge couplings of the
Standard Model without the need for new physics between the weak scale and the grand
unification scale (The issue of stability of the electroweak vacuum is an open one [13,14] as
it depends on quantum gravity corrections.).
Despite Glashow’s insight, a few generations of physicists worked on so-called beyond-
the-Standard-Model physics between the early 1970s and the late 2010s. This program
was motivated by different reasons related to the question of the spontaneous breaking
of the electroweak symmetry. In particular, the Higgs mechanism implied the existence
of a fundamental scalar boson, something that had never been observed until 2012. This
was a strong motivation to consider alternatives to the Higgs mechanism using the idea
of dynamical symmetry breaking, where the scalar would effectively be a condensate of
fermions. Technicolor and other composite Higgs models were very attractive from a
theoretical point of view; sadly, it quickly became clear that the simplest and most elegant
models were not compatible with data accumulated at colliders. Another logical possibility
was that there could be a lot of fundamental scalars and not just the Higgs boson. This is
the case of supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, where there are a minimum
of two scalar fields for each fermion field depending on the amount of supersymmetry
envisaged. Supersymmetry came with its own model-building issues; namely, these new
scalar fields had to be made heavy to explain why they had not been discovered yet and
supersymmetry had to be broken as we do not observe it as an exact symmetry of nature,
at low energies at least.
So why did this program of looking for physics beyond the Standard Model fail so
badly? On the one hand, one could argue that physicists of the age of Paul have been
very unlucky; indeed, nature picked a model that was proposed when they were finishing
their studies. There were good reasons to doubt the Standard Model. On the other hand,
applying Gell-Mann’s criteria (one point for papers that are correct in the sense of being
relevant to nature, minus one for papers that are not relevant to it) to evaluate particle
physicists active in the last 50 years reveals that most of them are in the red and that they
have been barking up the wrong tree.
Clearly one issue is that the main guiding principle to look for physics beyond the Stan-
dard Model was a red herring. Naturalness is the idea that the Higgs boson’s mass should
be stable under radiative corrections. Proponents of this idea argue that the bare mass of a
scalar field receives corrections at the quantum level from self-interactions and interactions
with other particles of the model. These corrections are argued to grow quadratically with a
dimensionful cutoff that is introduced to regularize loop corrections. They argue that if the
cutoff is taken of the order of the reduced Planck mass (i.e., the energy scale where quantum
gravitational effects are expected to become important), there needs to be some unnatural
adjustment between the quantum corrections and the bare mass to keep the Higgs boson’s
mass light. Most of the model building effort to go beyond the Standard Model has been
Entropy 2024, 26, 366 3 of 6

motivated by this naturalness “problem”. Four broad classes of solutions have been envis-
aged: models without fundamental scalars, supersymmetric models, models with a low
scale of quantum gravity and models advocating the anthropic principle.
In my view, naturalness is absolutely meaningless in the context of a renormalizable
quantum field theory, as masses and coupling constants cannot be calculated from first
principles. They are renormalized parameters which are used to absorb divergent quantities
appearing in the perturbative evaluation of quantum amplitudes. As such, they need to
be measured at some energy scale and can be scaled up or down using renormalization
group equations, but as we cannot calculate these parameters from first principles, it is
meaningless to talk about large or small values. Furthermore, whether divergences are
quadratic or logarithmic plays no role from a physical point of view. One could also argue
that the problem is not even well posed from a mathematical point of view, as the nature of
the divergences depends on the regularization schemed used. For example, in dimensional
regularization, quadratic divergencies do not appear in four dimensions.
It is remarkable that this problem was indeed first introduced by proponents of
String Theory, where it is indeed possibly an issue as they claim to be able to calculate
all fundamental constants which appear as the expectation values of some moduli fields
in their framework. But it is certainly not an issue for particle physics. From a particle
physics point of view, it should be clear to any researcher that the naturalness problem
was not a valid guiding principle. The discovery of a light Higgs boson without new
physics to stabilize its mass is the final nail in the coffin for naturalness after the discovery
of a cosmological constant that is small and again without any new physics to stabilize it
(similar arguments to those for the Higgs boson’s mass had been made for the cosmological
constant). The particle physics community spent essentially 50 years trying to solve a
problem which is not one.
It is fair to say that while experimental particle physics has been extremely successful
for the last 50 years and found one particle of the Standard Model after the other, particle
physics phenomenology has hit a wall and made very little progress partly because it has
been guided by the wrong guiding principles.
Another issue that has affected theoretical particle physics overall is that because it
has been increasingly disconnected from experimental physics, as it has been trying to
solve a problem which is clearly not relevant to nature, it has become a beauty contest.
An issue with beauty is that it obviously lies in the eye of the beholder and instead of
applying Gell-Mann’s principle to evaluate scientists, less objective criteria have been
applied, resulting in high-energy theory groups at top universities being taken over by
people convinced that the single most important problem was the naturalness problem.
Young people had to follow their lead and research to hope to be able to obtain a job in
academia. The problem we are describing here is not unique to particle phenomenology,
but it also applies to String Theory for the same reason: this program is mostly completely
disconnected from experiment or to a certain extent from physics which is an empirical
science. Overall, theoretical physics has become extremely speculative and the “cutest”
speculations get rewarded with prestigious faculty positions and academic prizes.
As we have argued, physicists of Paul’s generation have been unlucky, but it is also
clear that this generation decided to change the rules of the game when it became acceptable
to invent new particles without being forced to do so by experiment or mathematical
consistency of the theory.
How can my generation and younger theorists get out of this impasse? I can only offer
a very personal opinion. We need to refocus research on what nature and mathematics
are telling us. I see two clear problems, that while very difficult to solve, are certainly
worth trying to address as they could guide us to an understanding of what lies beyond
the Standard Model.
The first problem is obvious. It is dark matter, for which there is ample observational
evidence. Unless all these uncorrelated observations are wrong, which would be very
surprising, we know that Einstein’s theory of gravitation with visible matter (which can be
Entropy 2024, 26, 366 4 of 6

described by the Standard Model) is not able to explain, e.g., the galaxy rotation curves or
the Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum. These phenomena are clearly fully
disconnected and related to physics at different energy scales. However, they both point
towards physics beyond the Standard Model, as no particle of the Standard Model can
account for these observations. While a modification of gravitational physics is a logical
possibility, it is unclear whether this would be sufficient to explain all observation such
as, e.g., bullet clusters. The most logical explanation is clearly that there is some hidden
sector of dark matter particles that is weakly interacting with itself and extremely weakly
interacting with Standard Model particles, possibly only gravitationally (There is a caveat
here as primordial black holes could account for a least a good fraction if not all of dark
matter. I personally like this scenario very much as it does not require physics beyond the
Standard Model.).
Here again, the guiding principle described above has led people to consider mostly a
limited class of models called wimps, which stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
Wimps are common in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. Wimps are
now mostly excluded by searches at LEP, Tevatron and the LHC. Again, there was no real
theoretical reason to expect wimps to be relevant to nature, but it did not stop the field
from making an industry out of these models. From a theoretical point of view, very little
is known about the masses of dark matter particles and their interactions with regular
matter. Without any serious theoretical prejudice or guidance, it seems unrealistic and
unreasonable to build a new collider to exclude a small fraction of the allowed parameter
range for dark matter models. There is a recent effort that appears very promising to me
which consists of using existing quantum sensors to probe for ultra-light dark matter, see,
e.g., [15]. These are cheap experiments, which are mostly already operating, e.g., atomic
clocks, for other reasons. While they may not find dark matter, these experiments clearly
have other important outcomes in, e.g., the field of quantum metrology, and quantum
sensors have important practical implications which are likely to benefit humanity. There
is thus a no lose game argument to be made for these experiments.
My suggestion to young theorists is to make an effort to talk to the atomic, molecular,
and optical physics (AMO) community and to learn their slang. Progress in quantum
technology is fast and there are plenty of opportunities to propose tests of the Standard
Model using these new technologies based on quantum physics.
The other direction I would like to mention is that of quantum gravity. While we
are still far away from having a theory of quantum gravity which is ultra-violet finite,
modern quantum field theoretical techniques can be used to derive an effective action
for quantum gravity that enables one to perform calculations for any physical process
taking place at energies below the reduced Planck scale. This approach is called the unique
effective action [16–20]. The only required assumption is that general relativity is the
correct low-energy limit of the theory of quantum gravity. The effective action enables
some model-independent predictions of quantum gravity (see, e.g., [21]). While these
effects are, as expected, very small, they demonstrate that calculations in quantum gravity
are feasible and do not require any speculation.
While these quantum gravitational effects are small and unlikely to be relevant to
currently conceivable experiments, they can provide us with some important insights
into quantum gravity. My hope is that this program could give us some hints about
the correct fundamental theory of quantum gravity, for example, by providing us with
consistency conditions.
I would like to emphasize that this approach has already produced some important
results. Indeed, it has enabled us to show that black holes have a quantum hair, which
is the key feature to explain how information escapes an evaporating black hole, thereby
resolving the famous Hawking paradox [22–26]. It has also enabled us to calculate the
leading-order quantum gravitational corrections to the entropy of a Schwarzschild black
hole, which forced us to introduce the notion of quantum pressure for black holes [27].
Entropy 2024, 26, 366 5 of 6

I strongly believe that this is not the end of the story for this approach to quantum
gravity. I believe that connecting our results to some ideas coming from String Theory
such as the AdS/CFT correspondence or the Swampland program could help us discover
interesting results connecting gauge theories and quantum gravity.
In terms of probing quantum gravity experimentally, I think that one should again
turn towards quantum technologies. Establishing that gravity can entangle macroscopic
objects would be highly interesting [28,29] and proof, if one is needed, that gravity is a
quantum force.
My feeling is that we are making some important progress and that while the way
people have performed particle physics for the last 50 years has to change, there are plenty
of interesting opportunities for bright young theorists if they are willing to take some risks,
ignore famous people and try to follow their physical intuition, mathematical consistency
and nature.
Finally, let me argue that while the approach followed by Paul and this generation did
not lead to new discoveries, it was still valuable in the sense that it pushed experimentalists
to keep an open mind about the type of physics that could supersede the Standard Model.
Paul with his creativity and productivity has played a crucial role in this endeavour. On
this note, I would like to use this opportunity to congratulate Paul on his 80th birthday.

Funding: The work of X.C. is supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council
(grants numbers ST/T006048/1 and ST/Y004418/1).
Data Availability Statement: This manuscript has no associated data. Data sharing not applicable to
this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

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