Stay on the edge of your seat. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will keep smashing particles until the end of 2018, although this will be our last chance for a while to see a new particle emerge from the cloud of collisions. A year from now, the atom smasher will shut down for two years of upgrades.
With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the LHC completed the menagerie predicted by the standard model of particle physics. It was a victorious moment, but we haven’t seen anything as monumental since. We know that there is exotic physics lurking beyond the standard model; dark matter and dark energy have not yet been explained. But the LHC has not seen signs of either – yet.
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“It’s like we’ve done a corner of a puzzle, but we don’t know what the picture on the box looks like and we don’t know what the rest of the pieces are,” says Claire Lee, a physicist at CERN. If new particles are too heavy or last too long before they decay, the LHC won’t be able to detect them and we will either have to build a bigger collider or devise new ways to look for them.
For now, it’s a numbers game. Every second the LHC is running, 600 million particle collisions happen in its detectors, spraying out debris. The stuff we’re looking for is extremely rare, so it may only crop up once every thousand billion collisions. That leaves an avalanche of data to sift through for minuscule anomalies.
“We know there is exotic physics beyond the standard model, but the LHC hasn’t seen signs of it. Yet”
That process takes a long time – results are still coming out from data taken in 2012. So just because the cameras will stop rolling doesn’t mean the main feature is cancelled: weird new particles could be hiding in LHC data from this year or years past, but we might not know for a while.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Last chance saloon for the lhc”
