CERN LHC: Particle collider to get energy boost

European particle physicists say the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will be run at higher energies in 2012 than in previous years

The higher energy 4 Tev level, 0.5 higher than levels used in 2010 and 2011, will allow the LHC to deliver the maximum possible amount of data this year before it goes into a long shutdown to prepare for even higher-energy running, a release from CERN headquarters in Geneva said Tuesday.

"When we started operating the LHC for physics in 2010, we chose the lowest safe beam energy consistent with the physics we wanted to do," Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology, said.

"Two good years of operational experience with beam and many additional measurements made during 2011 give us the confidence to safely move up a notch, and thereby extend the physics reach of the experiments before we go into the LHC's first long shutdown."

In the last two years, the LHC has concentrated on narrowing the search for the Higgs boson, considered the foundation particle of particle physics.

However, to confirm its discovery or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether will require one more year's worth of data, researchers said.

"By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs," CERN's research director, Sergio Bertolucci, said.

"Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

CERN SUSY: Higgs-Boson result means elegant universe is back on agenda

After a short spell on the rocks, a mathematically elegant view of the universe is back in vogue. 

Recent hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider help explain why we have not seen evidence for the beautiful theory of supersymmetry yet - and point to fresh ways to focus the search.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, is an extension to the standard model of how particles and forces interact. Via elegant equations, it posits that every fundamental particle - including quarks, electrons, photons and neutrinos - has a heavier, as yet unseen "superpartner" with slightly different properties (see diagram). 

This smooths some embarrassing wrinkles in the standard model. However, not one superpartner has yet shown up at the LHC, the particle smasher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, prompting fears that, despite its beauty, SUSY could be wrong.

That changed on 13 December, when LHC physicists reported that they might have found traces of the Higgs boson, the standard-model particle that is thought to give all others mass. The data suggested a mass for the Higgs close to 125 gigaelectronvolts, 133 times that of the proton and too light for a Higgs to survive without a heavier companion particle, which could be a superpartner.

"This is very good news for people who believe in supersymmetry," says Howard Baer of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. 

He's one of several researchers who have calculated what the suspected Higgs mass could mean for SUSY particle, or sparticle, detections at the LHC.

Baer reckons it can explain why sparticles have not yet been seen. Particles get their masses by interacting with the Higgs field; the stronger the interaction, the heavier the particle.

So if the Higgs is confirmed at 125 GeV, which is heavy for SUSY models, many superpartners must be on the heavy side too. 

Baer and colleagues calculated that in several different versions of SUSY, a 125-GeV Higgs means squarks (the SUSY version of quarks) and sleptons (SUSY versions of electrons and neutrinos) must weigh 10,000 GeV or more, far too heavy for the LHC's detectors to find (arxiv.org/abs/1112.3017).

"Even last summer, people thought that squarks might be quite light and around the corner," Baer says. 

"This makes it look like the LHC will have a little bit more difficulty trying to pull out a SUSY signal."

That's not to say the LHC won't find any sparticles, though.

Given the new estimated mass of the Higgs, Baer calculates that the gluino - superpartner to the gluon, which carries the force that holds atomic nuclei together - could be as light as 500 to 1000 GeV.

The LHC is already probing this range, albeit not for gluinos specifically. Light gluinos won't be detected directly, but by the particles they decay into.

Another possible super-quarry is the stop, the superpartner of the top quark. In some models of supersymmetry, there are two stops, one monstrously heavy and another relatively light. 

According to Marcela Carena at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and colleagues, a 125-GeV Higgs could put the light stop between 100 and 130 GeV, easily visible at the LHC (arxiv.org/abs/1112.3336).

Of course, all this assumes that the Higgs signals recur in further experiments. Right now, they do not have the statistical significance to count as a discovery. "I very much hope that what we have seen so far finally ends up being the real Higgs," says Carena.

'Supersymmetry' Could Be The Next Next Big Thing In Physics

Physicists said the next big thing in the world of particle physics will be the extension of the standard model of particle physics known as supersymmetry or SUSY.

According to a team of researchers, the better understanding of the universe will lead to the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, and will lead to the discovery of its extension, the SUSY.

University of Oklahoma researchers said SUSY predict new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model.

Physicists Howard Baer, Homer L. Dodge Professor of High Energy Physics in the OU Department of Physics and Astronomy, and his colleagues were the first in the world to show what SUSY matter might look like at colliding beam experiments.

Earlier reports said the Large Hadron Collider has not been successful so far in finding SUSY, while Atlas and CMS experiments is expected to provide new analysis on SUSY in March 2012.

The LHC will reportedly double the energy required to prove the SUSY theory.

Baer, who has studied SUSY for 25 years, said the discovery of the Higgs boson will open the door to a whole new world of super particles. "Finding the Higgs boson is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the Higgs boson is only the tip of the iceberg of SUSY matter," Baer said.

"With SUSY, we are talking about the next level of the laws of physics. If there is SUSY, then we will find super partners, which will provide a new perspective for the origin and evolution of the universe. At that point, we can say we are on the road to a much deeper comprehension of nature, " Baer added.

The researchers said SUSY may be the next big step in understanding cosmology and the origin of dark matter, the so-called invisible particles that dominate the matter density of the universe

CERN Higgs boson: Tantalising Glimpse of 'God Particle' but No Discovery

Scientists at at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva have found signs of the Higgs boson, but stopped short of claiming a full discovery of the so-called 'God particle'.

The leaders of the two teams of researchers, ATLAS and CMS, revealed their findings on Tuesday to a packed seminar at CERN, where they have been trying to find the elusive particle using the £6.2 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built to recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The researchers were keen to stress they were not making an announcement saying that the particle definitely exists, but that the new data is strong enough to suggest the question will be answered next year, one way or another.

Physicist Fabiola Gianotti, head of the ATLAS team, said the particle is more likely to be found in lower mass or energy ranges, a discovery they only made recently. This means that the search for the "God particle" has now been narrowed down to a signal centred at around 126 GeV (Giga electron volts).

"I think it would be extremely kind of the Higgs boson to be here, but it is too early," Professor Gianotti said during the seminar.

"More studies and more data are needed. The next few months will be very exciting... I don't know what the conclusions will be."

The results showed a spike in the graph taken by the ATLAS and CMS teams, where the apparent Higgs boson began to decay after temporarily existing when the LHC smashed particles together.

Oliver Buchmueller, a senior physicist on the CMS team, said: "We see a small bump around the same mass as the Atlas team and that is intriguing.

It means we have two experiments seeing the same thing and that is exactly how we would expect a Higgs signal to build up."

Speaking at the end of the seminar, CERN director Rolf Heuer summed up the findings by saying: "These are preliminary results, we're talking small numbers and remember that we are running [the LHC] next year.

"The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller, but it is still alive. We have not found it yet. Stay tuned for next year.

"But be careful - it's intriguing hints," he said. "We have not found it yet, we have not excluded it yet."

If CERN discovers that the Higgs boson does not exist after all, physicists will have to undertake a massive rethink of how the universe works and how particles obtain their mass after spending decades searching for this elementary particle.

The Higgs boson is named after particle physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the idea in 1964.

CERN Physicists Anxiously Await News of Higgs Boson

High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics.

On Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass.

The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints of what might turn out be the elusive particle when more data is gathered next year.

Alternatively, the experimentalists say that a year from now they should have enough data to rule out the existence of the most popular version of the Higgs boson, sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of another explanation of why particles have mass.

So the whole world will be watching.

Big Bang experiments inside particle accelerators at CERN - images

A collection of tracks left by subatomic particles in a bubble chamber.

A bubble chamber is a container filled with liquid hydrogen which is superheated - momentarily raised above its normal boiling point by a sudden drop in pressure in the container.

Any charged particle passing through the liquid in this state leaves behind a trail of tiny bubbles as the liquid boils in its wake.

These bubbles are seen as fine tracks, showing the characteristic paths of different types of particle

Picture: SPL/Barcroft Media

Images of Big Bang experiments inside particle accelerators at CERN - Telegraph

LHC: Large Hadron Collider shut down until February 2010

Scientists have switched the world's most powerful atom-smasher to standby for two and a half months, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ended the year "in style", CERN said, achieving more than a million particle collisions in the last two weeks and accelerating proton beams to energy levels never reached before.

CERN said the LHC would be restarted in February after a short technical stop to prepare it for collisions at even higher energy levels.

"Commissioning work for higher energies will be carried out in January, along with necessary adaptations to the hardware and software of the protections systems," CERN said in a statement.

The 3.9 billion-euro (5.6 billion dollar) collider was relaunched in November after 14 months out of action because of an electrical fault.

Scientists hope to use the collider -- inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border -- to understand the origins of the universe by recreating the conditions that followed the Big Bang.

So far, the LHC has achieved collisions at an energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV), and CERN wants to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.

Before the LHC experiment, no particle accelerator had exceeded 0.98 TeV. One TeV is the equivalent to the energy of a flying mosquito.

The LHC aims to resolve physics problems including "dark matter" and "dark energy", thought to account for 96 percent of the cosmos.

The scientists' Holy Grail is to find a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass.