Comments on: The LHC Dashboard

By: Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:52:21 +0000

[...] every challenge that particle accelerators could think to throw at it. But it’s going to be blown out of the water in a couple of years. Still, a pretty good run. Thanks, Standard Model [...]

By: The Big Bang Experiment - Page 5 - Meez Forums

The Big Bang Experiment - Page 5 - Meez Forums — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:57:09 +0000

[...] to an old Cosmic Variance post, the power of one of the LHC’s proton beams at full energy is 10 trillion watts (TW). (A watt is a [...]

By: Will CERN Destroy The World? « ab initio. ab intra.

Will CERN Destroy The World? « ab initio. ab intra. — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 19:04:00 +0000

[...] LHC startup plan. Includes dates, energies and luminosities [...]

By: LHC dates

LHC dates — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:47:09 +0000

[...] So here it is: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/06/20/the-lhc-dashboard/ [...]

By: Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance

Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:26:41 +0000

[...] It’s served us well for three decades, withstanding every challenge that particle accelerators could think to throw at it. But it’s going to be blown out of the water in a couple of years. Still, a pretty good run. Thanks, Standard Model Lagrangian! [...]

By: End of the summer school season | Cosmic Variance

End of the summer school season | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:28:07 +0000

[...] Hey, Lufthansa has wireless in the sky â€” how cool is that! So here I am at roughly 38,000 ft, somewhere over Canada, 6.5 hours into the flight with 4.5 hours left to go…. I’m on my way home from the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, where one of the last summer schools of the season just finished. The topic was Expecting LHC, which was the hot topic for summer schools this year. In fact, everybody who is anybody had one. The LHC is turning on next year and everyone wants the new crop of graduate students to be prepared! [...]

By: Life as a Physicist » 1 pb-1

Life as a Physicist » 1 pb-1 — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 08:29:10 +0000

[...] The reasons for the delay are varied. As pointed out over on Cosmic Variance, the main problem is not enough of the magnets will be commissioned and certified to run at the currents required to bend a 7 TeV beam of protons. It would be foolish to push them further before you carefully test them. In a system this large and complex is pays in the long run to do it bit-by-bit no matter how frustrating. [...]

By: The Story So Far… » Blog Archive » While Probing The Fabric Of The Universe, Wear Your Safety Goggles

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 20:24:15 +0000

[...] But they need to be a tad careful in turning it on… [...]

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 05:29:10 +0000

Peter,

As a fellow blogger I see you understand that the likelihood of getting your question anwered is directly correlated to the niceness of your comment!

Seriously, I saw this on your blog yesterday and meant to respond but got distracted. I am glad you brought it up again.

So, regarding when announcements of discoveries will come out of the LHC – it depends, naturally, on what is being discovered. If there really are blackholes at a TeV, or if there is a heavy gauge boson (or Randall-Sundrum type graviton Kaluza-Klein resonances) at 2-3 TeV, then we will know very quickly. Probably during the 2008 physics run. However, missing energy signatures (such as for Supersymmetry) or the Higgs to gamma gamma channel will take a few YEARS. Those signatures require exact calibration and knowledge of the detector.

Now, you asked about the LHC Olympics. Up to this point, this excerise has been largely ignored by the phenomenological community, because quite frankly we find it rather useless. This excerise is precisely what our research has been about for the last 20 years and we feel that we don’t need to bone up on the basics. However, part of the more formal particle and string community have been working on it. I am not aware of any great progress, but then, I admit that I have not been paying much attention.

Joe Lykken, in his summary talk at the yearly phenomenology meeting, Pheno06, presented a quiz to the phenomenology community. He presented two examples of possible “discoveries at the LHC,” the first was simply top-quark production and the second was a combination of the production of a couple of new particles. Joe simply showed some kinematical distributions, just as any experimenter would do during a talk, and asked the audience to guess what the signal was. The result – well, we nailed the top-quark production signal instantaneously, and after a couple of minutes got the double new particle production too.

My point, I guess, is that the LHC Olympics folks have alot of catching up to do. I think it is good that they realize this and are interested and are working on it.

By: Peter Woit

Peter Woit — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:20:07 +0000

JoAnne,

Your prose is brilliant.

Tommaso Dorigo says he predicts nothing coming out before summer 2009. When data does come out, do you think the theorists who have been participating in the “LHC Olympics” will be able to put what they have learned to use?