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LHC Prepares Marathon Higgs Hunt
gbrumfiel writes "Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are preparing to run the collider until the end of 2012 in the hopes of finding the Higgs particle, part of the mechanism that endows other particles with mass. The machine was originally supposed to stop in 2011 for a year long upgrade, but scientists now think they can find the Higgs if they run for longer. 'If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments waiting for data, there is no way we could get home at night without having slashed tyres on our cars,' says Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director for research and computing."
A higgs boson tastes like chicken, but you never know until you try it!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That's so mean.
"If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments"
Woah woah woah, I think someone got confused about what they're meant to be colliding here. I don't think smashing grad students is the answer.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Not paining a very good picture of their community there, is he? Also, did anyone else read his name as "Silvio Berlusconi?" Seems like a misspelled version, or something...
weinersmith
...until 12-12-12 to be exact, and then the LHC will create a black hole in which we will disappear and end up halfway across the universe in an undisclosed location.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are preparing to run the collider until the end of 2012" Thanks captain obvious. I'm not a moron, I know they won't be running it AFTER the world ends.
Not saying it does or doesn't, but at what point would they would decide to quit searching it for it?
Seems to me like its a move made under pressure from the Tevatron competition. A good move? Hmmm guess we'll have to wait and see.
More proof the Mayans are right!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A higgs boson tastes like chicken, but you never know until you try it!
I thought the story title AND your response said "Haggis". Thank you preview!
Home of The Suki Series
"Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider [CC] are preparing to run the collider until the end, in 2012.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
"No Higgs So Far..."
"Repeat the experiment!"
"Okay... there. Nothing.
"Repeat the experiment!"
"Okay... Still nothing.
"Do it for a year!"
"Okay..."
December 21.
The sudden shut-down will lead to the spontaneous formation of a stable strangelet and, well, you know the rest.
They're out to kill me!
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
They don't have a good track record so far at predicting the LHC uptime. They may get that 2011 outage after all.
Winky: Which subatomic particles do you hope to find with your particle accelerator? Leptons? Hadrons? Maybe the particle believed to cause mass: the Higgs Boson?
Dr. Mel: Nope. I'm after the particles that are believed to cause stupidity: MORONS.
Dr. Mel: Slamming reality-show contestants together at light-speed should produce a few of them.
Winky: The "Cold Particle".
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
They're gonna run it until 12/21/2012
I'm a scientist.
"Yes, that's right, because looking for the Higgs is not like looking for your keys in the drawer, but like looking for a "shooting star". You can say "Oh, my keys are not in the drawer, I looked twice", but you can't say "Oh there are not shooting stars (well, meteorites to be precise), I looked at the sky twice". In particle colliders you get bazillions of events, you register a tiny fraction of them and by analyzing a fraction of the ones you registered you try to build the big picture, so the more experiments the better your chance of "seeing" exotic events.
The trick to making humour appropriate on slashdot is to reduce the subtlety by 10% before submitting.
Or maybe I just failed to make it funny at all. Happens from time to time.
The article stated that a big driver for continuing the search at current energies is that Fermilab is right on their heels and might find the Higgs first if they take a break for a year.
As I see it, the Higgs could fit into one of two energy ranges:
1. A range that the limited LHC and Fermilab can both probe now, with the LHC having some advantage.
2. A range that only the full LHC can reach.
If it falls into the latter, then nobody is discovering the Higgs for a few years until they get the LHC in gear. If it falls into #1, does it REALLY matter that much who finds it first?
If what we care about is the accumulation of knowledge then we should cooperate and not compete here. Retask the LHC for higher energies, and have Fermilab continue to explore the lower-energy space. This way we find the Higgs more quickly as we have two non-redundant operations working on the problem, rather than having one be completely redundant.
Also, who knows what other interesting physics we'll find at the higher LHC design energies, that we're just pushing off for years sticking where we are at now?
Can't the lead authors on the competing 1000-author papers maybe agree to pool their efforts, and settle for first and last on a 2000-author paper instead? :) Then we poor taxpayers footing the bill can at least feel like we're all getting SOMETHING for our money...
You look like you need some peace of mind. Hope that helps.
Bertolucci says that there are also political reasons to extend the run. The world's second most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is nipping at the LHC's heels, and if it continues to run, might beat the larger accelerator to the Higgs.
That says all you need to know. And FNAL data seem to point to a lighter higgs, not the heavier which is easier for LHC to find quickly. They need time to accumulate data and the orginal timeline might not have been good enough for a light higgs.
Any relation to Indiana Jones?
it would actually be quite exciting if it isn't found as it means a whole different paradigm for mass is at work
That's correct but if it is not found by the end of 2012 that does not mean that the Higgs is ruled out. The 2012 run is to see the Higgs if it is at the low end of its allowed mass range which is where all the data so far suggest it is. However to rule it out we need to run the machine at its full energy and for longer to cover a Higgs with a mass of up to ~1TeV/c2 which is the maximum possible value. After this the Standard Model sans Higgs predicts probabilities of certain processes occurring in at over 100% (the unitarity bound is exceeded) which is obviously nonsense and so we have to see something (Higgs or otherwise) by then.
If you look at the latest data from Fermilab then, unless they can radically improve their analysis technique and barring an LHC disaster, they are unlikely to get enough data to see the Higgs before the LHC. Their current data agrees well with background with well over half their dataset analyzed. Typically if you start to see signs of a signal this first appears as an excess of background events because you are seeing some signal but not enough to say that it is different from the background. Of course a better analysis technique could change all that so it is not ruled out but, given the data already analyzed, the odds are against them.
Yo Way Yo
Home Va Ray.
Yo Way Rah.
Jerhume Brunnen-G!
So, running the LHC will not end the world. Shutting it down will.