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LHC Restarts High-Energy Quest For Exotic Physics
astroengine writes: It's official: After a long 27 month hiatus for upgrades and a 2 month restart, the world's largest particle accelerator is back in the particle collision business. As of 10:40 a.m. CET (5:40 a.m. ET), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was running at record-breaking energies and collecting science data. Physicists now expect the particle collider to run non-stop for the next 3 years. We are in a new era of high-energy particle physics where, for the first time, we don't exactly know what we'll find. "With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning," said CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry in a press release. "It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all of the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen."
Actually what will be the most interesting is that after three years NOTHING HAPPENS, that is to say that our knowledge of Physics is fairly complete. However nature has a way of surprising us.
We have found particles at energies of x^1, x^2, and now with the W and Higgs, x^3. There's good reason within the standard model to believe that this progression will continue at least through x^4. It's fairly easy to see the energy ranges where the particles so far have clustered, and there really no rational reason that there won't be a cluster at even higher energies, based on the same Feynman-Dyson diagram solutions that resulted in use predicting the W and Higgs energy ranges. If you Monte Carlo at the higher energy ranges with the same constraints on the relativistically invariant pair production, the math shows particle spikes up to 10^5 (not that the LHC can hit those energies, but the math works...).