On Peres' statement "opposite momenta lead to opposite directions", decaying systems and optical imaging

We re-examine Peres' statement ``opposite momenta lead to opposite directions''. It will be shown that Peres' statement is only valid in the large distance or large time limit. In the short distance or short time limit an additional deviation from perfect alignment occurs due to the uncertainty of the location of the source. This error contribution plays a major role in Popper's orginal experimental proposal. Peres' statement applies rather to the phenomenon of optical imaging, which was regarded by him as a verification of his statement. This is because this experiment can in a certain sense be seen as occurring in the large distance limit. We will also reconsider both experiments from the viewpoint of Bohmian mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics particles with exactly opposite momenta will move in opposite directions. In addition it will prove particularly usefull to use Bohmian mechanics because the Bohmian trajectories coincide with the conceptual trajectories drawn by Pittman et al. In this way Bohmian mechanics provides a theoretical basis for these conceptual trajectories.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, LaTex, to be published in Found. Phy

The Discovery of the Higgs Boson with the CMS Detector and its Implications for Supersymmetry and Cosmology

The discovery of the long awaited Higgs boson is described using data from the CMS detector at the LHC. In the SM the masses of fermions and the heavy gauge bosons are generated by the interactions with the Higgs field, so all couplings are related to the observed masses. Indeed, all observed couplings are consistent with the predictions from the Higgs mechanism, both to vector bosons and fermions implying that masses are indeed consistent of being generated by the interactions with the Higgs field. However, on a cosmological scale the mass of the universe seems not to be related to the Higgs field: the baryonic mass originates from the binding energy of the quarks inside the nuclei and dark matter is not even predicted in the SM, so the origin of its mass is unknown. The dominant energy component in the universe, the dark energy, yields an accelerated expansion of the universe, so its repulsive gravity most likely originates from a kind of vacuum energy. The Higgs field would be the prime candidate for this, if the energy density would not be many orders of magnitude too high, as will be calculated. The Higgs mass is found to be 125.7$\pm$0.3(stat.)$\pm$0.3(syst.) GeV, which is below 130 GeV, i.e. in the range predicted by supersymmetry. This may be the strongest hint for supersymmetry in spite of the fact that the predicted supersymmetric particles have not been discovered so far.Comment: 26 pages, Conference Proceedings Time and Matter (TAM2013), Venice, Feb. 201