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."

Comments

hear hear

[zlives]

reach around for all Physicists, especially since the target is set so high.... as in "anything" or "nothing" at all.

"we don't exactly know what we'll find" maybe our ass or maybe not

Keep your crowbar close

[Sir_Eptishous]

and stock up on grenades!

Re:Keep your crowbar close

[bobbied]

and stock up on grenades!

You are not a preper, that' much is plain to see..

Freeze dried and canned food, water filters, guns and ammo are more important.

Re:Big Bang?

[RavenLrD20k]

Could be. For all we know the Universe we live in is nothing more than some particles racing through a tube and our entire timeframe from bang to end is nothing more than a small blip of infinitesimally insignificant readings on some giant screen.

15 Petabytes

[avandesande]

Apparently it will collect 15 petabytes a year.
http://www.lhc-closer.es/1/3/1...

Here is a picture of server room
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/...

Re:15 Petabytes

[jandrese]

That's around 250 HDDs a year at current densities, or 600 tapes. That's not a trivial number, but for a large organization like the LHC it shouldn't be much of a problem. You could fit all of those hard drives in about 20 RU with room for redundancy if you really wanted to. That's half a rack a year.

Re:15 Petabytes

[zekica]

Isn't it 2500 HDDs (assuming 6TB each) a year?

Re:15 Petabytes

[jandrese]

Bah, you're right. I typoed in 1.5TB instead of 15TB. So you go from half a rack to 5 racks. Still not an unmanageable amount of hardware.

Re:15 Petabytes

[avandesande]

I used to think that way too but small physics departments without any special equipment can comb through the data and make discoveries they otherwise couldn't make. Just like getting time on the hubble telescope...

Re:15 Petabytes

[bobbied]

AKA the biggest and most useless expense in the history of physics so far.

Hey, you got to have SOMETHING to write that Physics PHD thesis on... Consider it fodder for the physics majors of the world.... An investment in education.... Then any actual science that comes out of it is an actual bonus...

Re:15 Petabytes

[Blaskowicz]

It looks like they doubled to 30 PB a year ; LHC second run doubles the data output.

Re:15 Petabytes

[NicknameUnavailable]

The meta-data used in processing the raw data collected is likely to be far far larger.

Re:15 Petabytes

[hcs_$reboot]

This looks like the server rooms of 1970. In 40 years all of this will take the space in a pocket at most.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[PineGreen]

I agree about the bill and nothingness, but nice retirement packages?!?!

Google "postdoc hell" and you will get he real picture. Many of PhDs get out of the conveyor belt at 40 with zero savings and no future prospects. It's really quite sad (luckily physicist can mostly at least code)

Re:Big Bang?

[Cpt_Kirks]

Logged in now.

I was referring to one of the collisions.

Say, a BIG ONE.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[jandrese]

Oh yes, all of those Particle Physicists definitely got in it for the money... Check out that 15 year old Volvo lifestyle!

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Check out that 15 year old Volvo lifestyle!

Hey, they're pretty good for collisions.

Important message from CERN's Vice Admiral

[WaffleMonster]

The LHC will not start a chain reaction in the universe converting it all to a lower energy state and letting all the planets in all the solar systems turn to goo.

It will not blow a hole in space-time and let all the matter get sucked thru the hole. It will not destroy gravity.

I am not an atomic playboy as one of my critics labeled me colliding these protons to satisfy my personal whim.

Re:Important message from CERN's Vice Admiral

[zlives]

too bad

Old but still funny...

[skelly33]

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lh...

This is incredible

[Celarent Darii]

Never thought I see to live these energies... and now for 3 years we will get some interesting effects.

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.

Re:This is incredible

[Beck_Neard]

It's going to produce interesting science for way more than three years. Remember that the tevatron shut down four years ago but physicists are still finding new and interesting stuff in the data it collected. I wouldn't be surprised if new discoveries came out of the LHC data for ten or even twenty years after shutdown.

Re:This is incredible

[david_thornley]

Our understanding of physics is wrong. We know that. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity don't work together. We have two exceedingly successful theories, at least one of which is wrong. In order to resolve this, we have to break something so we can get some clue as to what's really happening.

Back around 1900, we were in a similar situation, with physics seeming to be nearly complete. It needed little more than explanations for black-body radiation and the failure of Michelson-Morley to find ether drift. Of course, these explanations turned out to be fairly involved.

Re:This is incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

GR and QFT work very well together in the low energy limit, which goes right to -- and even through -- the event horizons of black holes.

However, the most prominent pairing of GR an QFT -- semiclassical gravity -- cannot deal with arbitrary high numbers of loops. On the other hand, Wilson's EFT work showed very clearly that you do not need to consider arbitrary numbers of loops to have an effective field theory.

The nature of the mathematical device that can probe beyond the UV limit of semiclassical gravity (or how far beyond it can probe) is not yet known, but there is no reason to outright abandon either GR or QFT in practice today, and indeed, there is no clearly better replacement.

Neither GR nor QFT is necessarily *wrong*, but both are incomplete, and the paths to complete one or the other tend to create calculational problems or outright conflicts. It is possible that one may complete to some much higher energy limit (or perhaps to arbitrary energies) while the other does not, which would lead to new problems involving how the metric is generated or how particles with wavelengths comparable to nearby curvature behave, rather than the problems we have currently.

There *is* a desire to have a quantum mechanical description of gravity, simply because every other fundamental field has quantized. However, not every fundamental field nor its internal symmetries nor intereactions has been discovered yet -- that's been a good chunk of the focus at LHC. Moreover, equating QFT with the Standard Model itself is problematical on its own (ignoring gravity), since for example there is no theoretical explanation in the Standard Model itself for the striking similarity (but for a change in sign) in the charge of the electron and that of the proton. It also has even less to say about the Dark Sector, where at least GR has some successful phenomenology and some useful ideas about how to generate metrics sourced by e.g. dark matter. It also has an increasingly large number of finely tuned (but free) parameters with practically no ideas about why they take on the values in our universe. Several successful GR models (including the standard cosmology) have approximately one free parameter and hints about selection mechanisms (although those tend to really put the infinity into an infinitely large universe).

The frustrating thing is that as purely local theories (testable in the scale of devices in laboratories here on earth), both GR and the Standard Model are exquisitely accurate. The LHC, if we're lucky, will show that the SM is clearly incomplete at laboratory device scale, and if we're verrrry lucky will kill off lots of ideas about ways to complete TSM to unification (or even higher) energies, or ways to replace both it and GR in their respective high energy limits (but that's perhaps the least likely outcome, in spite of lots of string/brane theorists' hopes).

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[stox]

A lot of Physicists have been taking up careers with High Frequency Trading firms. Some are making excellent money doing so.

Exotic physics..

[Rinikusu]

Shit. Things have gotten so bad the quarks have to get on the pole to make a living.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[HornWumpus]

Physicists are generally technically smart people. They don't drive Volvo's. That's the *studies and soft sciences people

The Mayan Calendar and Leap Year

[Hussman32]

Just wondering if the Mayan Calendar included leap year in the translations. If not, let me see, 5126 years, divided by 4 = 1281 leap days missed, and it's been about 884 days since the 'end of the world' and experiments are on track for the next 900 days.

Um...

Curiously...

[Anonymous Coward]

These people spent billions of dollars to get experimental results that they expect they won't be able to explain, at least right away. Their highest hope? To stumble upon new physics.

Yet when it comes to the EM Drive or as we saw yesterday, strange results from a sheet of graphine and a laser, it's all Bull Shit, poor Science, charlatans, etc.

Re:Curiously...

[amRadioHed]

New physics doesn't generally contradict old physics. It may provide more precise predictions or cover edge cases that the old theory didn't handle well, but we will never discover new physics that tells us apples fall up from the tree instead of down. That is the reason for skepticism around something like the EM Drive.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Why not? Those old diesel ones will basically run forever, or until the parts holding the engine and drive train together rust away.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[MrTester]

What!??!!? There is no profit? KILL IT! We shouldn't spend any money on anything that doesn't show a first quarter profit.

That includes killing funding for any schools you attended because they all apparently failed to explain to you (and a lot of the general public) the value of general science research that isn't chasing a short term profit.

Take a look--

[sillivalley]

https://op-webtools.web.cern.c...

Live on the web -- this is a summary page, with much more available

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[pesho]

They were pretty good for collisions 15 years ago

There fixed that for you

Re:Big Bang?

[Third Position]

It would be the ultimate irony if God turned out to be a couple of grad students who are now sitting in the dean's office doing a lot of explaining.

This is improbable.

[tlambert]

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...).

Re:This is improbable.

[Pro-feet]

IAAPP, and I have trouble parsing your sentences.
Can you give a reference for what you're trying to say?

Re:This is improbable.

[tlambert]

Particle clusters seem to occur at exponents of baseline energies for what we consider to be ordinary particles. The exotic particles we've found have been at the higher end.

If you look at the early work by Dr. Jay Phippen, you'll see the intentional constraints he places on the pair production is the solution set to 12 (actually, 11, one was an identity) Feynman-Dyson diagrams. I believe his thesis is on file at Utah State University. The initial computations were done at Los Alamos labs, back with the CDC Cyber was "hot stuff". During the mid 1980's, when he was my mentor, I ported his software and the matrix math for him to Sun Microsystems equipment, and he was able to reproduce the results, which got us really, really close to the predicted mass of the W particle.

It also let us tweak things substantially, trying a lot more Monte Carlo collision simulations in a shorter period of time, and given that the new hardware was capable of representing much larger numbers, it allowed the extension of the test energy rangers much higher (into the Higgs arena, and beyond).

FWIW, the collisions were simulations of relativistically invariant P-P and P-N collisions using the Berkeley Physics package, and the produced particle pairs were further constrained by the physics after they were produced (i.e. energy, angle, and so on as to what counted as an "allowable" pair).

I believe you can also find some references to it through my other faculty advisor, Dr. Robert Capener's work, although he abandoned his involvement in the U.S. atomic weapons program shortly after the neutron bomb was created, and concentrated mostly on CS after that.

So I think it's improbable that we have seen our last new particles.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[penandpaper]

the value of general science research that isn't chasing a short term profit.

you must be some sort of communist.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[HornWumpus]

When they finally rust away you will through a party.

I can finally get a decent car! Ding dong the DL Volvo is dead.

The only problem will be finding a new car that performs badly enough.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[Applehu Akbar]

Bozons: the swarm of particles you get when you use Space Nutter Troll as the target in the LHC.

Re:No supersymmetry, please

[avandesande]

There is such a think as Ockham's Feather Duster, it's just not nearly as popular.

Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find.

[mikael]

Designed by supercomputer, built by machines, crashed by dummies.

Re:Big Bang?

[mikael]

"Yes, sir, um, you see, Beavis here had the idea of cranking up the voltage to the quantum uncertainty amplifiers. He figured if he did that, then that would be a pure source of randomness. And when you have total randomness, then anything can happen, so we thought that if anything were to happen, it could only improve the results of our experiment, since nothing was happening. Well, something did happen. I told him not to crank up the voltage to the highest setting at once, but to do it in steps. But he was in a hurry to meet his girlfriend, so he just turned the dial and just hit the red button. Didn't even give me time to put on my radiation goggles. Next thing, there's this giant flash in the gravitational reactor. Seconds later, there's a giant white glowing cloud of has which rapidly darkens down into millions of these little spinning glowing whirly things all floating and bouncing around. Yes, I thing the technical term is "galaxies". They just kept floating and bouncing around. That was really something, so I told him not to touch anything until our supervisor came in. When he did come in, he totally freaked out and ran out to the see head of department. That's when he contacted you and were summoned here."

only record 1 in million "events"

[peter303]

The make a quick assessment whether a particle shower is interesting, then store it for future analysis. The four detector complexes have up to 10K subdetectors each, different directions and energies. Then you propose what a certain decay sequence might look like and sift the trillion recorded explosions.

For exeample there were several dozen possible decay paths for the Higgs, but only a handful were detectable in this setup. It took longer to analyze the data than run the machine.

many experiments store the maximum feasible

[peter303]

Astronomy surveys, particle detectors, seismic surveys. The technology grows a factor of thousand every decade.

Large Hardon Collider

[Greyfox]

Large Hardon Collider

Non-stop?

[Michael Woodhams]

As I recall, the first run of LHC was scheduled to run only 6 months out of 12, due to seasonal electricity price differences (although I think they abandoned that to get back on schedule after the catastrophic magnet failure.) Does anyone know if they're really running non-stop for three years, or is there significant down-time that the science reporter didn't know about or glossed over?

Re:Big Bang?

[Required Snark]

Beavis has a girlfriend? That's clearly a different universe.