Is nature natural? | Jon Butterworth | Life & Physics
The Large Hadron Collider is starting its 2012 data-taking campaign. While eagerly awaiting this, we're still publishing data and digesting what we have learned from the past two years. And that seemingly tautological question is looming larger.Mostly I work on measuring what happens in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. But a couple of weeks ago I went to a meeting about what hasn't happened yet. This was "Supersymmetry, Exotics And Reaction to Confronting the Higgs" at the University of Maryland. SEARCH - a quality acronym if ever there was one.We know that around LHC energies special things happen in physics. The force carriers of the weak force - W and Z bosons - have masses in this energy range. This is why we are sure that if the Standard Model Higgs boson exists, it will be visible (eventually) here too1. More general arguments based on "naturalness" are often used to...
Read the whole article on The Guardian - Science
More from The Guardian - Science
Related
- Hunt for Higgs boson: Mass of top quark narrows searchMon, 7 Dec 2009, 12:45:18 EST
- Understanding what's up with the Higgs bosonThu, 28 Jun 2012, 12:07:47 EDT
- Fermilab experiments constrain Higgs massFri, 13 Mar 2009, 10:46:26 EDT
- Fermilab experiments narrow allowed mass range for Higgs bosonMon, 26 Jul 2010, 10:50:29 EDT
- Prelude to the Higgs: A work for 2 bosons in the key of ZWed, 30 Jul 2008, 11:22:24 EDT