Particle physicists made waves a decade ago. On July 4, 2012 6000 researchers working with the world's biggest atom smasher at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key. Physicists were thrust into the spotlight after the discovery fulfilled a 45 year old prediction.
Physicists didn't know what to make of the data from the 27 kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC before it began taking data in 2010. It's coming true so far. Barry Barish is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Supersymmetry is the leading extension of the standard model.
Physicists say it's too early to be discouraged. After 3 years of upgrade work, the world's largest particle collider is now powered up for the third of five planned runs. It should run for another 16 years and collect 16 times more data than it already has. There are subtle signs of novel particles in the data.
Some physicists say the writing is on the wall. Juan Collar is a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in small experiments. John Ellis is a theorist at King's College London. It is going to be similar to pulling teeth.
Physicists have been wrestling with the standard model since the 1970s. Ordinary matter consists of lightweight particles called up quarks and down quarks, which bonds in trios to make protons and neutrons. There are two sets of particles in the vacuum that can be blasted into oblivion.
Everything scientists have seen at particle colliders is described in the standard model. It can't be the final theory of nature. It doesn't include dark matter, which seems to outweigh ordinary matter in the universe six to one.
It was supposed to be broken by the LHC. The ring of the collider has protons that crash together at energies seven times higher than at any other collider. New force–carrying particles or even mini–black holes were some of the things physicists imagined to see in a decade. Beate Heinemann is the director of particle physics at the German laboratoryDESY. Physicists said it would take more time to find the Higgs.
It took 3 years for the Higgs to appear, but it was easier to produce because it was less massive than expected. Ten years after that discovery, no other particle has been found.
Two physicists' cherished ideas have been undermined by the lack of supplies. Naturalness suggests that the low mass of the Higgs more or less guarantees the existence of new particles. Any particles in the vacuum will interact with real ones and affect their properties. That is how virtual Higgs bosons work.
Both ways are cut by that physics. The top quark, a heavier version of the up quark, should pull the mass upward by itself. To counter the effects of the top quark, at least one other new particle with a similar mass and just the right properties must exist in the vacuum.
Such particles would be supplied by the theory of supersymmetry. It has a heavier partner with a different spin. Lurking in the vacuum would help explain how the field of the vacuum came into being. Particles that are supersymmetric may account for dark matter.
Smaller discrepancies between observations and model predictions have emerged in the past decade that will be explored in the next three years. B mesons, particles with a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an anti, according to physicists working with the LHCb detector. The two rates should be the same according to the standard model.
Experiments suggest the muon may be slightly more magnetic than the model predicts. There are more than 115 The existence of exotic particles called leptoquarks could explain the anomalies.
Any difference between the observed and predicted properties of the Higgs would be a sign of new physics. In August 2020, teams of physicists working with the LHC's two biggest detectors announced that they had spotted the decay to a muon and an anti muon. If the rate of decay varies from predictions, it could be a sign of new particles hidden in the vacuum.
Those searches aren't likely to yield a "Eureka!" moment. Heinemann says there is a shift towards very precise measurements. Carena doesn't think we'll learn anything new in 20 years.
Some people are less optimistic about the chances of the experiment. Marvin Marshak, a physicist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, said that people don't know how wide the desert is. It will be harder to convince the governments of the world to build a bigger collider if the LHC finds nothing new.
Physicists are excited to smash protons again. Scientists reworked the lower energy accelerators that feed the collider in order to upgrade the detectors. The flow of data should be increased by as much as 50% by running at a more constant collision rate.
Physicists have been tuning up the beams for a long time. When the beams are stable, they will restart taking data. It will take 10 years and 1 day after the announcement of the Higgs discovery for those switches to flip. I am going into some sustained running.
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