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.

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?

Garbage: Please read my comment #24.

Tony Smith: The subject of how/when the LHC folks are going to release their data is literally going to be the subject of my next post. So stayed tuned….

I’m confused with the choice of units. Furthermore, are u gonna tell me that the LHC stores half the total energy output of the world!!….per century?

So be careful, willya?

The physical definition of power is the rate at which work is done, P = dE/dt. In units, 1 Watt = 1 Joule/second. The 10 TeraWatt figure is the power dispensed by the beam in the fraction of a second it takes to be aborted. Given the numbers above, that fraction of a second works out to be roughly 10^-4.

Peter Woit asked (in a comment on his blog pingbacking this blog entry):
“… Anyone want to guess how long it will be from April 2008 until the experiments have enough data to say something interesting, understand their backgrounds, and are ready to go public with results of the data analysis? How long did it take in the case of the Tevatron? …”.

In the case of the Tevatron with respect to discovery of the T-quark, here are some quotes from the book “The Evidence for the Top Quark” by Kent W. Staley (Cambridge 2004), with my comments [in brackets]:

“… As of February 1987,CDF expected to begin their … run in November of the same year …

… the lab … revised the schedule … begin antiproton transfers to the Tevatron on June 6 1988 … [schedule revision similar to LHC now]

Throughout the 1988-89 run, CDF was in a kind of race with … UA2 … at CERN … CDF won this “race” early in 1989, not by finding the top, but by showing … a top mass limit that ruled out its discovery by UA2 … [ similar to LHC winning the Higgs race when its mass appeared to be at beyond the reach of Fermilab]

around … 1991 … Kondo analyzed … the first … published … CDF dilepton event … from the 1988-89 data … Kondo found that the event could be reconstructed as the decay of a top-antitop pair, with a top mass of around 130 GeV/c^2, but “it has a very broad error” … Kondo … wanted to publish …[a]… paper in PRL … The paper met resistance from the collaboration, who felt it too closely resembled a top discovery claim … Kondo “didn’t make … trouble”, and instead published the paper in the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan …

In 1991 … Goldstein and Dalitz … were trying to apply their method [of data analysis] to the first CDF dilepton event …[so they]… asked … Sliwa … for … help …

Goldstein and Sliwa … presented results at a heavy flavors group meeting in April [1992] … showing a bump in the probability distribution at a top-quark mass of about 120 GeV/c^2 … After that, according to Sliwa, “Goldstein was told not to come to Top Group meetings,” a decision that Sliwa believed was “highly improper” …

the July 24 [1992] issue of Science … described the position of Dalitz and Goldstein … “They think the patterns they found look suspiciously, though not unambiguously, like the top quark and deserve further analysis.” CDF, the article noted, “isn’t impressed” … The Science article described Dalitz and Goldstein as having “gained access to unpublished, partially analyzed CDF data only when Krys Sliwa, a member of the group, shared it without telling his colleagues.” … Goldstein denied both the sense of furtiveness and and secrecy conveyed by the Science article…

In June of 1992 … the run designated “Ia” began …

On October 29, 1992, just prior to the meeting of the … DPF … CDF recorded an event that looked strikingly like an e – mu top decay … In fact, although it was not known at the time, one of the jets in this event would be tagged by both the SVX and SLT b-tagging algorithms … some collaboration members even regarded the event by itself as worthy of publication as a top-quark event … the event, … known as “the DPF event”, would be shown at the meeting … No claim would be made what the event signified …

On April 26, 1994, … CDF … release[d] … a paper describing “evidence for top quark production” … D-zero did not claim to have established such evidence …”.

Some questions that come to mind:

1 – How will LHC deal with release of individual event data, to avoid controversies and yet permit outsiders to contribute their methods and interpretations,
in the light of the fact that the Kondo and Dalitz/Goldstein/Sliwa methods of analysis were (and still are) useful techniques developed outside the collaboration ?

2 – How will LHC deal with release of its internal analyses, bearing in mind that the DPF event was released in 1992 and it was not until 1994 that a discovery “evidence” paper was released ?

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/