When reactivated in early 2015, the LHC will operate with an energy of 13 TeV, almost double its current maximum energy. And now we're into 2015. http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/d...141212-jpg.jpg LHC Ready to Hunt Down Mystery Dark Matter Particles http://news.discovery.com/space/upgr...les-150218.htm Quote:
http://www.livescience.com/49852-lar...scoveries.html Quote:
Supersymmetry is a theory (or set of theories) that says particles, which are divided into two classes called bosons and fermions, are related and that every particle has a "partner." This means all the force-carrying particles (bosons) have a fermion partner, and all the fermions have boson partners. The gluino, for example, is the supersymmetric partner of the gluon. Gluons carry the strong nuclear force that holds protons and neutrons together, so they are bosons. Gluinos would therefore be fermions. However, supersymmetric partners have not been detected yet. This is an issue because some of the theoretical calculations show that at least a few should have appeared by now. That said, as the LHC runs its second set of experiments, physicists hope that they will see these supersymmetric partners, which would help narrow down which version of supersymmetry theory is correct, if any. 2. More than one Higgs? The Higgs boson solved a major problem for the Standard Model, but it raised some important questions as well. Theories say there might be more than one kind, and the LHC's second run might help to answer how many Higgs bosons there are, and why the Higgs has the mass that it does. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe] 3. Dark matter Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that makes up some 25 percent of the mass and energy of the universe. Astronomers say there's about five times as much of it as normal matter, but dark matter only interacts with things via gravity. As such, a blob of dark matter in a box would be invisible. This makes it hard to figure out what it is. The LHC, though, may generate enough energy to pop out a dark-matter particle from one of the collisions. Dark matter would have to be electrically neutral (no positive or negative charges) and not decay in a few seconds. "If we find something that looks like it could be dark matter at the LHC, we would try to measure as much as we can about it … and hopefully get hints of how to detect it directly in other experiments," said Jay Hauser, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 4. Solving some problems of the Big Bang Using heavier proton beams, such as gold or lead, the LHC will allow physicists to see what conditions were like just a few billionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the birth of the universe. Exploring how matter behaves under these conditions can offer insights into how the universe evolved to appear as it does — why the first matter was mostly hydrogen and helium, and why it has the proportion of matter and antimatter that it does. |
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