{"id":2788,"date":"2008-07-29T10:23:10","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T10:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/29\/reader-request-lhc\/"},"modified":"2008-07-29T10:23:10","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T10:23:10","slug":"reader-request-lhc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/29\/reader-request-lhc\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader Request: LHC"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I’d like to hear what you think we’ll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I’m not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we’re not likely to learn anything at all this year, other than the answer to the question “do the components of the LHC work?” They’ve got a few weeks of preliminaries before they start any particles going through, and then a whole bunch of sanity checks and calibration tests to do, and a scheduled shut-down in December. It’s unlikely that any actual science will be done in the short term.<\/p>\n

As for what they’ll learn in the longer term…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I really don’t have the background to have an educated opinion about what they’ll find when they start getting real collisions. As I understand it, it would be really shocking if they didn’t find the Higgs boson– if the Higgs mass isn’t in the region that the LHC can explore, then something is drastically, devastatingly wrong with the Standard Model.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, I don’t have any way to evaluate the claims of different things that might be detected. In a perverse sort of way, I’m actually kind of rooting for “nothing.” As someone outside of high-energy physics, I think it would be kind of amusing if they completely failed to detect any sort of supersymmetric partner particles, or any of the other things that they’re hoping they might see.<\/p>\n

It wouldn’t be funny to people in<\/strong> those fields, but as an experimentalist, I enjoy watching theorists squirm.<\/p>\n

Actually, the most fun possible result would be for Fermilab to scoop them on the Higgs, and one of the low-energy AMO-based methods to detect something (PNC transitions, a non-zero electron EDM, some departure from theory in the g-factor measurements) that would constrain the range of new physics enough for the LHC results to be anti-climactic. That would be fabulous.<\/p>\n

What can I say? I’m a schadenfreude<\/i> kind of guy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks: I’d like to hear what you think we’ll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month. Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I’m not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we’re not… Continue reading Reader Request: LHC<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}