LHC to restart in march after 'power upgrade' in search of supersymmetric particle

[Master Disaster]

A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson.

The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy.

This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino.

Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter".

And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe.

"It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky," said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC.

"We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter."

The University of California at Berkeley researcher made her comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the debris

Supersymmetry is an addition to the Standard Model that describes nature’s fundamental particles and their interactions.

Susy, as it is sometimes known, fills some gaps in the model and provides a basis to unify nature's forces.

It predicts each of the particles to have more massive partners. So the particle that is light – the photon – would have a partner called the photino. The quark, the building block of an atom’s protons and neutrons, would have a partner called the squark.

But when the LHC was colliding matter at its pre-upgrade energies, no sign of these superparticles was seen in the debris, which led to some consternation among theorists.

Now, with the accelerator about to reopen in the coming weeks, there is high hope the first evidence of Susy can be found.

The machine is going to double the collision energy, taking it into a domain where those theorists say the gluino really ought to emerge in sufficient numbers to be noticed. The gluino is the superpartner of the gluon, which "glues" the quarks together inside protons and neutrons.

The LHC’s detectors would not see it directly. What they would track is its decay, which scientists would then have to reconstruct.

But importantly, those decay products should include the lightest and most stable superparticle, known as the neutralino – the particle that researchers have proposed is what makes up dark matter, the missing mass in the cosmos that binds galaxies together on the sky but which cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

"This would rock the world,” said Prof Heinemann. "For me, it’s more exciting than the Higgs."

'The other side'

So, not only would supersymmetry proponents be elated because they would have their first superparticle, but science in general would have a firm foot on the road to understanding dark matter.

Dr Michael Williams, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "We sometimes talk about the dark matter particle, but it’s perfectly plausible that dark matter is just as interesting as [normal] matter, [which] has a lot of particles that we know about.

"There might be just as many dark matter particles, or even more.

"Finding any particle that could be a dark matter candidate is nice because we could start to understand how it affects the galaxy and the evolution of the universe, but it also opens the door to whatever is on the other side, which we have no idea what is there."

Particle physicists have three major conferences in August and September, one of which is the main gathering of the supersymmetry community. All these meetings are bound to draw huge interest.

But Prof Jay Hauser, who works on the CMS detector at the LHC, added a little caution on timings. "Even if we did see something, remember it might be complicated enough that it takes us a while to explain it," he told reporters.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31476337

What an awesome machine that thing is, responsible for changing physics once and starting in a few weeks will be trying to do it again.

Its this kind of research which will push mankind forward as a species.

[blackadder]

lets hope everything goes right, when it doesn't it takes a long time to cool this sucker off. these are E8 symmetries right?

[qwertywarrior]

i want something to go wrong so they put those servers on ebay for cheap

[Hasleo]

you know you can just go the scrap yard where big server farms throw their stuff out, and take their old servers and troubleshoot them and bag you have a good server for free  

[qwertywarrior]

you know you can just go the scrap yard where big server farms throw their stuff out, and take their old servers and troubleshoot them and bag you have a good server for free

9/10 times they are pentiums with 512mb of ram 

[Toddwjp]

9/10 times they are pentiums with 512mb of ram 

 

so that means you have a decent nas

[qwertywarrior]

so that means you have a decent nas

a loud nas  with a 100mbps nic

those small fans on 1U racks  are annoying

[Toddwjp]

a loud nas  with a 100mbps nic

those small fans on 1U racks  are annoying

open case, stick a 140mm to it with cable ties

[GoldSrc]

[Omon_Ra]

My friend had posted something to Facebook about this. But the posted link was more about the possible badness that could come. Neil de Grasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have voiced concerns, but my favorite is this one:

 

http://yournewswire.com/cern-to-attempt-big-bang-in-march-stephen-hawking-issues-warning/

 

Does CERN headquarter’s symbol of Shiva, dancing the cosmic dance of death and destruction, signal the TRUE purpose of CERN’s existence? A look at the ‘Shiva’ (the Hindu God of Destruction) symbology surrounding CERN’s headquarters gives us the beginning of what we need to know. “The men who would play God, in searching for the God particle, are truly going to find more than they bargained for as they open the gates of hell” we are warned by Stephen Quayle, “they will find inter-dimensional beings who have a taste for human flesh and humanities destruction. Most scientists, in lacking an understanding of the ‘supernatural entities’ that are going to confront them, are way beyond their ability to comprehend, let alone control, the forces of Pandora’s box that will be released.”

 

HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED

 

It's pretty cool either way. Even if all goes horribly wrong, what a way to go.

[mr moose]

I remember the first time they started that up.  So many nut cases crying that it would tear open a hole in space-time.    Personally I blamed the LHC every time I missed a strike when bowling, due to the enormous gravitational shift it exerted on the earth (pulled my ball right of the lane and into the gutter).  

 

 

 

My friend had posted something to Facebook about this. But the posted link was more about the possible badness that could come. Neil de Grasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have voiced concerns, but my favorite is this one:

 

http://yournewswire.com/cern-to-attempt-big-bang-in-march-stephen-hawking-issues-warning/

 

 

 

 

HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED

 

It's pretty cool either way. Even if all goes horribly wrong, what a way to go.

 

My god man their back.  every time someone tries to discover something new a moron comes out of the woodwork telling us about demons and hell.  Fuck!  if that was ever going to happen (with all the warnings and discoveries we've had so far) the planet would look like a walking dead set by now.

[Omon_Ra]

I remember the first time they started that up.  So many nut cases crying that it would tear open a hole in space-time.    Personally I blamed the LHC every time I missed a strike when bowling, due to the enormous gravitational shift it exerted on the earth (pulled my ball right of the lane and into the gutter).  

 

 

 

 

My god man their back.  every time someone tries to discover something new a moron comes out of the woodwork telling us about demons and hell.  Fuck!  if that was ever going to happen (with all the warnings and discoveries we've had so far) the planet would look like a walking dead set by now.

 

Indeed, you'll always have the chicken little alarmists with anything science related, but so far the world hasn't ended. However, I do feel that the level of science that is taking place now is closer to science fiction-worthy, well-intentioned-science-experiment-goes-wrong leading to a cataclysmic event, as extraordinarily unlikely as it may be. Being that we barely understand the mechanics that are at play, attempting to manipulate or deconstruct the theoretical building blocks of the universe could have wholly unexpected consequences.

 

Looks like the project has uncovered a whole new level of dumb. I'd say CERN has been successful and the LHC has paid off.

 

I definitely think it has. Like the space program, it's not just about what they are doing at this moment, as important as that may be, but helping the overall public interest in science. Whether or not they understand it is another issue, but if it can inspire or ignite the imagination of a student somewhere, I'd call that a success.