As far as particle physics and big questions about how the universe works, we are living in very interesting times, I’m happy to say. We’ve all been waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over two decades, and now it turns out (I’ve been hearing from a number of people in various conversations here at the center) that the machine is running really well – impressively so. That alone is great, but an interesting thing is that we are almost certainly going to know something significant before the end of the current scientific run next year, maybe even by the end of 2011!
Recall (see posts like this one) that the primary goal is to understand the physics responsible for the Higgs mechanism – the physics that gave mass to those elementary particles that have mass. The particle that does this is called the Higgs particle, and exactly how Nature implements the Higgs mechanism is what we hope to learn. There’s sort of a vanilla version of the story, that fits into the Standard Model of particle physics without any further adornment than just doing the basic job. Then there are more complicated versions of the story, where, in some cases, the Higgs comes as part of a bigger physics story that leads the way to what’s generally called Beyond the Standard Model Physics. As the machine searches toward higher and higher energy that probes higher and higher mass, the simplest possibilities will begin to fall by the wayside pretty soon if nothing is seen. An exciting thing is that it seems that whether or not we have the Standard Model Higgs might be known soon.
Now that’s exciting enough, but there’s more. Actually, a lot of people, for various reasons to do with very fundamental questions* are hoping that there is more structure than just the vanilla scenario. The hope is that perhaps the Higgs sector is part of a bigger story that addresses those other questions. One of those hoped for stories is called Supersymmetry, which would imply the existence of several more particles besides just the Higgs. Now, the cool thing is that the simplest models of supersymmetry could be in danger as well if we do not see something in the coming several months. Wouldn’t it be interesting if both the Standard Model Higgs and the simplest models of Supersymmetry were ruled out? (I’m not saying that they are – it’s all to soon to tell – but it is a possible outcome.)
The point is that even if no Higgs is seen this experimental run, it looks like we’ll still know something new and interesting for sure. That’s a fantastic situation to be in! (Stay tuned for more. A good blog to watch is Resonaances.)
-cvj
*Look up the Hierarchy Problem…
