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LHC Restarts High-Energy Quest For Exotic Physics

Posted by samzenpus on from the looking-for-the-unknown dept.

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."

19 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. 15 Petabytes by avandesande · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/...

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
    1. Re:15 Petabytes by jandrese · · Score: 2

      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.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    2. Re:15 Petabytes by avandesande · · Score: 2

      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...

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
  2. Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find. by jandrese · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  3. Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Funny

    Check out that 15 year old Volvo lifestyle!

    Hey, they're pretty good for collisions.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  4. Old but still funny... by skelly33 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  5. This is incredible by Celarent+Darii · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:This is incredible by david_thornley · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    2. Re:This is incredible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

  6. Exotic physics.. by Rinikusu · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
  7. The Mayan Calendar and Leap Year by Hussman32 · · Score: 2

    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...

    --
    "Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
  8. Curiously... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find. by MrTester · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Take a look-- by sillivalley · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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

  11. Re:Big Bang? by Third+Position · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    --
    American Third Position
    Finally, a real choice!
  12. This is improbable. by tlambert · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...).

    1. Re:This is improbable. by tlambert · · Score: 2

      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.

  13. Re:I'm pretty sure what we'll find. by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

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

  14. only record 1 in million "events" by peter303 · · Score: 2

    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.