LHC to come online in summer 2009. What do you expect to see?

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by LogicTech, Dec 15, 2008.

  1. LogicTech Registered Member

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    Well, the most recent press release from CERN is that the LHC will be fully operational in the summer of 2009.

    So, what do we expect/hope to find when the experiments finally get under way? Do you think we will finally find that elusive Higgs Boson or will we have to scrap the Standard Model all together (or is that going to happen anyway)?
     
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  3. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    As I said before, they won't find the Higgs and only create new particles. Light can only travel so fast and every collider will never attain that speed so they won't find the Higgs now since they haven't already with FERMI. Just because there's more energy doesn't mean that the Higgs will all of a sudden appear.
     
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  5. LogicTech Registered Member

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    Why wouldn't they though? It is predicted by the Standard Model...

    Light travels at c, you can't change it's velocity. And all particles in there are only traveling at 99.999...% the speed of light. You have to demonstrate why they won't be able to find the Higgs. As far as I know, they haven't yet actually made an experiment with high enough energy (although they did find some hints of the higgs field back in 2000).

    True, but this isn't something that particle physicists just came up on a whim. This was something that was predicted, and is necessary if the Standard Model is to hold.

    If it doesn't exist, then what do you expect to see? And I'm not asking for just some layman speculation, I do want at least some rigor behind any reason for or against the higgs boson... Demonstrate why they won't find the Higgs Boson, or at the very least give a reason for why it isn't likely to exist (using sources of course). Fermilab found hints of it back in 2000, if not the actual particle itself.
     
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  7. BenTheMan Dr. of Physics, Prof. of Love Valued Senior Member

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    Ok. Two things.

    One: LT---we currently understand the SM to be an effective field theory, just like (for example) Newton's gravity. Most of the time, for weak gravitational fields and small velocities, we can ignore the Einstein corrections to Newton's laws. Likewise, for most scattering experiments below a TeV or so (center of mass energy), the SM gives fantastically accurate results. There are some small deviations, but mostly the results are very accurate.

    Two: cosmic---you are wrong on many levels. Historically, for example, there are a whole host of particles that just "appeared" when we went to higher energy colliders. For example, the charm, bottom and top quarks. There was no experimental evidence for these particles (but there WAS theoretical evidence). Physically, the higgs has a certain mass, and a certain probability to be produced in particle collisions. This probability increases with energy, so the higher energy collisions we make, the more likely the higgs is to be produced. They probably HAVE produced higgs bosons at FermiLab---indeed, they certainly have. But because they have produced so few, they can't do statistics---they have a very low chance of observing a single event, they have to observe several events. You can't do science with one data point.
     
  8. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    We will see when it starts up won't we. I just hope that they can make it work! All that money and the machine doesn't work, what a piece of work.
     
  9. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    Tiny little energy black holes. If they show up then it shows M-Theory is headed in the right direction.
     
  10. BenTheMan Dr. of Physics, Prof. of Love Valued Senior Member

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    This would be the coolest thing, I think, but it's not where I'm putting my money

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  11. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    But wouldn't it be sweet if our universe is really a D-brane on the tip of a throat?
     
  12. LogicTech Registered Member

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    Ah, I see. So even if we do find particles or phenomenon not predicted by the Standard Model, it will still be useful for describing things at a "relatively" low energy state. Thanks for clarifying. I'm still a n00b at physics I know...

    Only if Hawking radiation is real and not a fluke. It most likely is, but, well, we don't really know what goes on at such high energies...
     
  13. BenTheMan Dr. of Physics, Prof. of Love Valued Senior Member

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    This is a view that took several decades to develop, and a lot of us were noobs for a long time.

    Ummm...I think you're confused. Crunchy Cat is describing some new directions in String Theory. Basically the way it works is that you have some Calabi Yau, with various "types" of singularities. Don't ask me what this means, but essentially Kodaira showed that singularities have the same structure as the classical Lie groups. So you can have an E8 singularity or an A5 singularity, etc. Again, don't ask me how this works.

    If this singularity is at the bottom of a throat (i.e. decoupled from what's happening in the rest of the CY), and you wrap a d brane around it, through some black magic which I don't (yet) quite understand, you get particle physics.
     
  14. Prosoothus Registered Senior Member

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    Now I understand everything.:bugeye:
     

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