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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 03/10/2010 : 01:38:48
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And I'd never even heard of regular fentobarns. (Hat tip to Greg Laden.)
Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN, the European physics organization, has much to say about upcoming experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: The LHC is already over a week into its 2010 run, and the start of physics at 7 TeV is just around the corner. Last week, participants at the annual La Thuile workshop in Italy had the chance to take stock of what lies in store for the LHC’s first physics run. They learned that there’s a great sense of anticipation here at CERN and at particle physics labs around the globe, and for good reason – we’re about to open up the biggest range of potential new discovery that particle physics has seen in over a decade.
Our objective over the next 18 to 24 months is to deliver one inverse femtobarn of data to the experiments. In other words, enough data to make significant advances across a wide range of physics channels.
Take supersymmetry. ATLAS and CMS will each have enough data to significantly extend today’s sensitivity to new discoveries. Experiments today are sensitive to some supersymmetric particles with masses up to about 400 GeV. An inverse femtobarn at the LHC pushes that up to about 800 GeV This means that in the next two years, the experiments at the LHC will explore as much territory in their quest for SUSY as has been covered in the history of particle physics to date. In other words, the LHC has a real chance over the next two years of discovering supersymmetric particles, possibly elucidating the nature of the dark matter that accounts for about a quarter of the mass and energy of the Universe. |
Personally. I'm hopeful that someone here can dumb some of this down for me.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/10/2010 01:41:31
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
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ThorGoLucky
Snuggle Wolf
USA
1487 Posts |
Posted - 03/10/2010 : 16:05:07 [Permalink]
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Oh nooooooooeees!!!!!111  |
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Machi4velli
SFN Regular
USA
854 Posts |
Posted - 03/13/2010 : 01:32:50 [Permalink]
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Again... arg. It's such an impressive machine, can't fault them too much for design issues.
Here's what (I think) I know about what he's saying:
Those eV numbers are electronvolts, a unit of energy with TeV being 10^12 of them. The LHC is supposed to accelerate hadrons (any particle made up of quarks, which includes protons and neutrons) around the big tube and crash them into each other. Right now, they want it to crash streams of protons into each other at energy of 7 TeV per proton. We aren't entirely sure what will happen at this energy level, but physicists have postulated what would happen at this level if the Standard Model of particle physics is correct, that certain types of hypothesized particles become observable (famously the Higgs boson). So if we can see what happens, we can either verify those predictions or show that they are incorrect. If those predictions are correct, we will see that lots of the theory physicists have built is valid.
But there are big challenges in observing the particles that may become observable. They would be hidden within a mass of particles we already know about after the collisions. With the collider constantly running, the Model predicts that only a single Higgs boson would be produced every few hours. The machine captures data on the particles after the collisions but this is a tremendous amount of information, so it will take much time to try to find the important information, if it is there, in the masses of data. They just want to capture the data and send it off to researchers to work on while they work on upgrading the collider.
Supersymmetry is another prediction of physicists that would be needed to uphold the Standard Model, and it would require some as-yet-unobserved particles to emerge at the energy level of the LHC.
Dark matter is matter that is postulated to be undetectable but is thought to be the reason for gravitational phenomena that we cannot explain via observed matter. This assumes we understand gravity itself correctly, but physicists generally think that we do.
These are all in some way predictions that try to explain why general relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent in our current understanding. These are all predictions or proposed ideas to solve different issues within this conflict, so they are not ideal or proven, just some tentative ideas that seem to explain a lot. |
"Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
-Giordano Bruno
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."
-Stephen Hawking
"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable"
-Albert Camus |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/13/2010 : 01:41:09 [Permalink]
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| Thanks, Mach! That really does help a lot. |
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 03/13/2010 : 22:14:00 [Permalink]
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| Also check Wikipedia. An "inverse femtobarn" is a unit of measurement of basically the number of particle collisions being observed by detectors. Wikipedia says that Fermilab took a decade to deliver one inverse femtobarn of data. Rolf Heuer was saying that he hoped that the LHC would deliver 5.0 to 6.67 times that rate of collisions in its early life. A lot. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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"... deliver one inverse femtobarn of data ..."
