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Science

Ten Years After the Higgs, Physicists Face the Nightmare of Finding Nothing Else (science.org) 90

A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight. Then came a long hangover. From a report: Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. "It's a bit disappointing," allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. "I thought we would discover supersymmetry," the leading extension of the standard model.

It's too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena. Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. "If they don't find anything, this field is dead," says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. "It's going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out."

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Ten Years After the Higgs, Physicists Face the Nightmare of Finding Nothing Else

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  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:30AM (#62621604)
    So interesting to see this headline a day after its polar opposite, As the Large Hadron Collider Revs Up, Physicists' Hopes Soar [nytimes.com]
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      In conjunction with Slashdot, LHC discovered the Dupitron Particle.

    • by eriks ( 31863 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:57AM (#62621748)

      It's in a quantum superposed state: Schrödinger's headline.

    • I doubt that the physicists involved ride the emotional roller coaster described by science headlines.

    • So interesting to see this headline a day after its polar opposite

      Those are in no way polar opposites. Those of us in particle physics all hope for new discoveries at the LHC - even those of us who have moved on to even higher energies with other [wisc.edu] experiments [pacific-neutrino.org]. However, we also have to face the real possibility that the LHC will not see find anything.

      This is because we have no control over how nature works, so all we can do is hope the solutions to the things we do not understand are within reach of the experiments we have the technology and funding to construct. It's a

      • We have no control over how nature works, but we have control over what modes of questioning we have nature exposed to. I imagine we will keep changing those and so keep discovering new things till the end of time.

      • So, after careful assessment, it is clear that Physics needs to go back to square one and recheck the initial assumptions in E =mC^2. The m is doing all the heavy lifting, too much perhaps? And the square should cancel, or it should be assigned, so the equation may be flawed on a level you currently don't understand, in quantum. As a check on observations in nature, refer to the double slit and start with a new set of assumptions to derive the action of the observed wave: Assume there are no inertial frame
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Every crap has to be emotionalized to an extreme degree. It is just pathetic. The actual people doing the work are pretty calm about things, the media is hysteric.

  • The LHC could look for signs of other dimensions. Change the type of particles they use, add in some rotating laser beams, and you'll be surprised at what is found.

  • There is in fact no limit to new particles. The only limit is the amount of energy you can put into colliding the known ones with each other. This quest will never end. Not, at least, until particle physicists run out of other people's money.

    • You talkin' bout Fractons? [wikipedia.org]
    • There is in fact no limit to new particles. The only limit is the amount of energy you can put into colliding the known ones with each other.

      ...and so hence there IS a limit to new particles.

    • False, the universe has means to collide particles with far more energies than humans have produced, and we've detected some of the composite particles produced. And then there is the matter of particles formed soon after big bang, also might be detected by humans.

      There are experiments ongoing to detect particles not made by human colliders.

    • There is a line of thinking that most of the particles detected in colliders don't exist naturally and are actually being synthesized through collision.
  • From The Submission:
    John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. "It's going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out."

    Hang on, sudden breakthroughs in science is akin to teeth falling out?!?!?!

    And even pulling teeth at least gets you results, hopefully not "long, uncertain grind toward discovery".

    His dental allusions are both inherently wrong and seem to be both anti-dentistry as

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      A lot of breakthroughs have boom-and-bust cycles. AI has been the same way. More powerful CPU's eventually gave researchers more options. Often it takes other technology to catch up before the next level can be reached. Solid-state electronics was explored early in the last century with great lab results, but manufacturing technology was not reliable enough to make mass production practical. When manufacturing caught up, solid-state became the dominant form of electronics.

      • Yes: in the case of AI, it was GPUs, not CPUs; deep learning is basically a whole lot of sparse matrix multiplication. It turned out that GPUs can be very good at that. We saw on the order of 20x speedups when at Toronto a bit over a decade ago we went from matlab on CPUs to custom CUDA code on GPUs. This, plus plentiful cheap GPUs (we used gaming cards back then), was enough to prove that deep neural networks were highly effective in solving key AI problems. We couldn't do it before, simply because the com
  • Wondering why so many early posters are so negative. You'd think they'd like the science that gave them their fancy smartphones and computers?

    But you remember what Einstein is supposed to have said about infinity...

  • They're going to have to look for a Viagra Particle so their Hardon Collider can keep working.

    (Obviously tongue in cheek, this whole article is a great example of a writer not understanding even one thing about what a particle accelerator does)

  • It indicates that the current model is almost right. There are some quirks with it but they should be able to resolve them without adding particles at the currently achievable energy levels.
  • ... to smash small and medium hadrons ... :-)

    [ They should really hyphenate the name: Large-Hadron Collider, or Large Hadron-Collider ... ]

  • The brilliant editors missed the "with the LHC" ending, so grossly changing the meaning.

    Good work, you must be so proud of your jobs.
  • What about a particle accelerator orbiting around earth? Powered by solar energy, cooked by space itself? Maybe even a tiny one, the size of an intermodal Shipping container.
  • Limits of technology (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:35PM (#62622260) Journal

    Stephen Hawking said that figuring out whether electrons and quarks were point particles or had structure, i.e., where hadrons, would require an accelerator the size of the solar system.

    He wasn't confident the machine would be built in his lifetime.

    • by Toad-san ( 64810 )

      Well, he got that much right anyway.

      Ever since I started watching "The Big Bang" (reruns of course), I've doubted more and more that there was anything to all this mess. A lot of my doubt is surely due to my ignorance (not a single symbol or formula on all those white boards) has ever made a lick of sense to me). But I find it hard to believe that someone can come up with a formula (esp. a whole white- or black-board full), and then actually _build_ hardware from those ideas (if indeed ideas they are).

      But

  • Superconducting super-colliding fusion quantum computer.

    With that, they can discover the fundamental particle of free energy that unifies scams and encryption. In theory, it will produce an infinite number of research grants at every point in the Universe and mine all the remaining Bitcoin.

    • Don't forget: that computer also needs the ability to tap into the body's aura to utilize supernatural energy fields so we can finally identify the Chi weight of Goop products.
      • Come to think of it, this all reminds me of stuff I read back in the 80s about Newman's energy machine. [wikipedia.org]. The inventor claimed that it was not a PMM, but was converting matter to energy via an undiscovered fundamental particle. IIRC, the author of the article dubbed that particle "the puton".

  • Play "Ten Years After"

    The song obviously: I'm going home.

  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @02:32PM (#62622512)

    Already there are known problems with Standard Model and experiments are exploring them, and CERN will be a part of them.

    Muon magnetic moment isn't the predicted value.

    W boson is too heavy.

    Neutrinos have mass, standard model says they shouldn't.

    Matter / Antimatter asymmetry shouldn't exist. It does, and so we exist!

    Dark matter, dark energy, gravity... Standard Model has nothing for these.

    • The problem is that the candidate solutions that exist at the energy levels that LHC can reach has already been ruled out.

      The remaining candidates require so much energy that not even the Future Circular Collider can reach them.
      • Time lords got ALGORE elected VP so that the SSC would be killed in favor of the ISS and Climate Change research. Their aim was to keep our timeline primitive. They didn't want our timeline developing psychic dogs or discovering the secrets of Time Travel.

      • False statement, LHC will be exploring the first two things I listed.

        Another ongoing experiment is measuring gravitational field effect on antimatter.

      • besides the first two, LHC also working on neutrino mass and oscillations for that matter.

        Nonsense to say LHC can't work on good chunk of the list I made

  • by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @03:30PM (#62622744)

    They just restarted this thing after upgrading the bejesus out of it.

    Isn't it running at 14 TeV now? Can't we wait to call it a failure until after at some research has been done with it?

    Literally no research has been done at the higher energy level.

  • That none of what theyâ(TM)ve discovered actually exists in the first place. That should give them new things to try and come up with.

  • The standard model is broken, but there isn't a good idea of what to replace it with. I'm not really sure that a fancier particle smasher is the right approach, but this doesn't mean I've got a better idea.

    Gravity just doesn't fit right. SOMETHING is wrong. But all the experiments keep saying "Yup, the standard model predicts just exactly this.". Except how do you explain dark energy, dark matter, etc.? About 90% of the universe.

    And there's a real chance that the explanation requires an atom smasher th

  • by careysub ( 976506 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @08:54PM (#62623562)

    If no new physics ever shows up at the LHC then this will tell physicists that there is no new physics, no new particles to be found within the accessible energy space of colliders that we can build at present.

    This is a valuable finding, if it proves to be the case, and we could not know this without trying.

    Not exciting I know, but knowing there is nothing in a particular search space is important knowledge.

  • When they wanted to turn this thing on the media was in a tizzy that it would create anti-matter that would destroy the universe. The way things are going now on planet earth, that sounds like a good plan B to get us out of this mess.
  • I work on the LHC... I'm not one of the physicists, though I share an office with a former LHC physicist. I'm in a small IT role related to storing some of the massive amount of data from the LHC. And before I get the ball rolling on this TLDR rant... I'll explain that in the conferences, symposiums and lectures I've attended lately... there is absolutely no shortage of goals for the LHC and many of them have practical application within our lifetimes.

    The Standard Model

    Wow... if you want to smack the poster
  • The necessary update to this version of the Universe hasn't been deployed yet, so the new particles haven't been implemented yet. It's probably stuck in QA and will go live soon, just in time for the LHC to detect the new DLC.
  • If you discover something, you can't control who benefits. LHC is one giant tautology. "This is what we know, and you won't disprove it!"
  • LOL - that has to be history repeating!
    Maybe one day, but I don't reckon that is today..
  • by jd ( 1658 ) <`imipak' `at' `yahoo.com'> on Thursday June 16, 2022 @07:11AM (#62624484) Homepage Journal

    Build a proper 100-mile-diameter supercollider with the same luminosity as the LHC will now have, but the higher energy that you can achieve by having gentler curvature. That's about the upper limit you can build on Earth realistically.

    Space, though, is an even better accelerator. Stick satellites in space that look for exotic particles resulting from energies we can't achieve on Earth.

    If neither turns up anything, THEN particle physics is dead.

Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together ... -- Carl Zwanzig

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