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Scientists To Hunt For Supersymmetric Particle In LHC
An anonymous reader notes this article about the upcoming restart of the LHC. "A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson. The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy. This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino. Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter". And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe. 'It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky,' said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC. 'We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter.'"
The upgrade they completed DOUBLES the energy!
Failing to find what the theories predict is still an advancement in knowledge.
Learning to fail, failing to learn, physicists can make a career out of it.
Only if they've covered all potential bases, which isn't likely as there are plenty of unknowns left in the universe. It may take decades of searching before we make the assumption that there's nothing to find, but it would still be an assumption.
No matter what virtues it may have, a theory that doubles the number of elementary particles is a gross violation of Ockham's razor. Well, maybe that's the way the world is made up. I just hope it isn't.
I hope it does not include systemd
Failing to find what the theories predict is still an advancement in knowledge.
Failing to find what a theory predicts largely excludes it (assuming the experiment isn't faulty), and is a good result and useful science. Whether or not science reporters can grok that is a job for the PR department (LHC has a good one - c.f. Particle Fever).
The Supersymmetry folks did not expect to find a Higgs boson at 127GeV. ATLAS did find what looks like a Higgs boson at 127GeV.
If there were a guarantee that this particle is the Higgs, then there wouldn't be a need to continue upwards to test Supersymmetry. But it's not guaranteed - so not finding supersymmetric pairs at the higher energies will firmly rule out the Supersymmetry model (reassigning physicists to other models) and increase the confidence that the discovered particle is the Higgs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Au contraire, if a theory predicts something its of great value to check if the prediction works. If it does - great, the theory is of some use. If not then that is equally useful, you get to discard the theory and work on ones that perform better. Regardless of outcome you have more information about how reality works and get to build more accurate theories about reality. And that is always the true goal of science - to find out how reality works. Finding that ones pet theory does not in fact describe reality is not such a great loss. And if you have lots of information about how reality works you often get to apply that to engineering and build lots of useful stuff. It might be hard to figure out how to apply something like the Higgs boson in engineering, but in some decades or centuries this insight might have great utility in building stuff.
Just turn it on its side and smack it a couple of times. That's how I get loose bits out of machinery.
Have gnu, will travel.
our BEST and most widely accepted model, the Standard Model, has problems. The Higgs boson is too light, and in fact the lighter it is the further off the Standard Model is
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/...
Failing to find what a theory predicts largely excludes it
In all of science except when it comes to climate. There the data is adjusted to fit the theory instead.
(Before anyone replies - climate skeptics know more about the science than the believers. A recent research headline that didn't make Slashdot ... )
We found it ...zup...
-end of transmission from earth-
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society are pro-AGW.
What could happen if they discovered the Voldemortino?
The centre of mass energy is actually going from 8 to 13 TeV so it is not a doubling of the energy. However we are increasing the luminosity (number of protons in the beam) too so we will probably have at least twice the reach in energy that we did before. While the article makes it sound like something new looking for Supersymmetry (SUSY) is something we have been searching for since the start of the LHC.
SUSY is the leading candidate theory to explain why the higgs is so much lower in energy that the energy scale at which gravity becomes important: the Planck scale. While there are good arguments to suppose that SUSY is within range of the LHC energy I would put about as much store in a prediction of which SUSY particle will be discovered first as I would in a 14 day weather forecast: there is some science that goes into it but there are so many unknowns that the prediction is likely to be junk. Worse, while we can be pretty certain that there will be some sort of weather in 14 days there is no guarantee that there is a lightest SUSY particle: SUSY might not exist in nature although this itself would raise some interesting questions.
The observation that the electron electric dipole moment is less than 10^-29 e cm (as measured by the ACME experiment in 2013) already places strong constraints on supersymmetric partner masses, making it rather unlikely that the upgraded LHC will see anything.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
(Before anyone replies - climate skeptics know more about the science than the believers. A recent research headline that didn't make Slashdot ... )
There is a difference between being skeptical and claiming that something is wrong, thus the need to distinguish between a skeptic and a denier.
IANAPP, but I thought that the lack of observed proton decay had largely invalidated supersymmetry.
I mean, "yea science" and all, but I suppose am I missing something?
Some mods are trolls. They mod things down just to piss people off.
Usually they are outnumbered by level-headed mods, that mod the post back up. Usually.
But seriously, there is no reason to get this upset. Realize that we are talking about three sentences that probably took you less than a minute to type, in the middle of a conversation of thousands of sentences, on a day that will see tens of similar conversations, on a site that produces these all day every day without end.
Even if you got +5 insightful, your post is just a drop in the ocean, with a very brief span of visibility.
(Before anyone replies - climate skeptics know more about the science than the believers. A recent research headline that didn't make Slashdot ... )
But do they know more than actual researchers? You can find stupid people believing any claim or cause, sometimes even a large number of stupid people. But what stupid people believe or don't believe shouldn't guide us, even if suggesting doing the opposite of a stupid person. What the people who actually know what is going on suggest is the best we have to go on.
A 126 GeV Higgs boson as we (also CMS did, btw) have observed it, and studied its properties in detail, is no problem to be accomodated in even the minimal versions of supersymmetry. What makes you say it was not expected at that mass? It's on the high side, but the higher the mass, the more that Higgs boson with or without supersymmetry would look the same in our detectors...
Specifically finding SUSY would be great for the people who predicted it. From the point of view of particle physics as a whole, the goal is seeing some physics not covered by the standard model. In any case unless you can write papers on the topic, it's useless to speculate what will be found. Since the accelerator already exists we don't need any hype about it.
However, if even this energy upgrade doesn't bring signals beyond the standard model, it will be very hard to ask for many billions of USD to build the next accelerator, based only on the hope of "we might see something".
I'm pretty sure that you guys are making all this up. It looks like cern geeks keep inventing theoretical particles, then search for them, find something that almost fits, then theorizes that another particle must exist, look for that until you find something that almost fits, then look for another particle etc. etc. etc.
It's like those astrophysicists. They have no idea either and keep making up hypotheses, backed up by arcane invented maths using as many dimensions as they can so they can postulate weirder scenarios, trying to link up the micro-cosmic and macro-cosmic.
Anyway, doesn't all this reek of 'ether'? - You know - an invisible matter that pervades space?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Particle physics did an excellent job building a multidisciplinary, international, scientific workforce. As a field, they are largely independent of the world of 12-36 month grants and frequent peer reviewed publications the rest of us live in. More scientific fields should look to particle physics for guidance on self-organization and priority setting.
However, in the process, particle physics has separated itself from general physics. Outside of some cosmologists, there are not many other physicists who can (or care to) work with particle physics colleagues. We were on board for Higgs, but I think the physics and more importantly, the culture, has veered off so far from what we're used to that it's going to be hard to justify discoveries as "fundamental."
Failing to find what the theories predict is still an advancement in knowledge.
That's putting it mildly.
A failed experiment can do more than advance knowledge. It can start a scientific revolution.
Consider what is arguably the most famous failed experiment in history: the Michelson-Morely experiment that failed to show the presence of an aether on which light was thought to travel. The consequences of this failed experiment included the development of Special Relativity.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
...justify building a new bigger more powerful accelerator.
Building another accelerator? It seems like they spend more time upgrading the LHC than operating it. I can just hear the mad scientist screaming "more ... power! More ... power!"
My wife, a particle physicist at Fermi Lab here in the US, works on the software used for these experiments. Now I understand why shy has been working 12 hours days these past couple of months!
I'm sorry, but all *uino are reserved for embedded controller related product names.
Always up to date!
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
You haven't actually studied physics have you?