The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to come online in a matter of months. For all the thousands of theorists working in high-energy physics, SUSY, string theory, and related topics, no one really knows what kinds of new particles are going to be coming out of the collision point. This, of course, is the entire point of doing the experiment! It’s the entire point of every physics experiment - we don’t know for sure what nature is going to do in a given situation and so we find out. If it does what we expect then we have an additional measure of confidence in the theory describing that situation, and if not then we have new data to begin working on new improvements or replacements to current theory. There are some cases - like the LHC - where theory isn’t well-developed enough to even make solid predictions as to what we expect and so the outcome will be at least a partial suprise regardless of what happens.
But we have some ideas. The big one is the Higgs boson. The standard model solidly predicts that it exists, and sets a range of possible mass values that’s well within the energy range testable by the LHC. If it exists in the way we expect it to, the LHC should find it without trouble. Beyond that, whatever else is observed in the particle detectors at the collision point is expected to include a tremendous number of unexpected and interesting things. Some of my friends working on SUSY models are hopeful that evidence of supersymmetric particles will be found. String theorists (and the string theory popular press!) are hopeful that evidence of strings will be found.
So what’s actually going to happen? I’m a physics grad student with zero experience in particle physics, and furthermore I’ve never even taken a high-energy physics class and so everything I know about it I’ve picked up from osmosis. But that’s not going to stop me from making some wild guesses! In fact, my friends and I have something of an unofficial pool as to what mass the Higgs is and what else will be found. I’m angling for the long-shot dramatic win: the Higgs boson won’t be found at all, and neither will evidence for SUSY or string theory. But what we will find will be amazing, exciting, and totally unexpected.
I’m probably totally wrong (except for the amazing and exciting part!), but I always did support the underdogs.
Any guesses from the readers?
9 responses so far ↓
1 Uncle Al // Jul 7, 2008 at 9:40 am
No Higgs. The Standard Model arrives massless. The Higgs mechanism is a desperate jury rig. No SUSY The axion telescope (CAST) is a bust, as was proton decay. Physics is more than pure mathematics.
Politically facile physics is obsessed with symmetries. Reality is obsessed with symmetry breakings. Let the divorce proceedings commence.
2 CCPhysicist // Jul 7, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I predict that string theorists will claim that any new discovery is evidence for strings, even though they don’t have any predictions at all!
Seeing “nothing” strikes me as rather unlikely for reasons similar to those that made the Bevatron a sure thing. (The Bevatron pushed into a region where the data trend said unitarity would be violated unless new particles appeared.) But if so, Higher Energy Physics is dead as a field of physics. Particle physics will have to be with high intensity at low energy, much like nuclear physics.
3 Uncle Al // Jul 7, 2008 at 5:07 pm
http://faculty.washington.edu/sethh/SLAC_Jan_2008.pdf
Comprehensive axion detection review, 4 MB
No axions. Don’t bet the mortage payment on SUSY.
4 Nick // Jul 7, 2008 at 6:01 pm
As a physics student with even less experience than yourself, I will only go so far as to predict seeing something unexpected that could be better seen with a differently designed detector.
5 Paul Murray // Jul 7, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Surely there’ll at least be another generation of quarks and leptons added to the standard model. Maybe the mass ratios will give us all a clue as to what’s *really* going on.
6 CCPhysicist // Jul 8, 2008 at 12:31 am
Another generation is only possible if its neutrino has a mass too big for it to show up in the Z decay width. A 50 GeV neutrino does not strike me as something included in the standard model.
7 andy.s // Jul 8, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Well, I think there’s a whole bunch of baryons that have never been seen, like ttt.
8 laughingstock // Jul 21, 2008 at 9:14 am
Jewish / Agnostic /Atheist pseudo-scientists have been trying to disprove God’s existence since Marx, Einstein, Freud, Leibniz etc.etc. They have conned the governments into these outlandish experiments for a hundred years. About all we have to show for their work is the nuclear weapon (and nuclear energy). Oh, wait a minute, that was Enrico Fermi!
9 J.J. van der Bij // Nov 9, 2008 at 11:50 am
The Higgs field may already have been seen at LEP,
but is not a single particle peak.
(Phys. Lett. B638,234(2006))
In this form it cannot be detected at the LHC,
however it can be studied at the International
Linear Collider
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