The next particle collider to be built, not counting the planned upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, seems likely to be the “Electron-Ion Collider” (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in the US. This will not be a machine probing the frontiers of high energy, but it will bring some exciting new capabilities, and it will indirectly help us understand the energy frontier.
I’m half way through the second week of my stay at the Aspen Center for Physics, where we have been discussing “Tightening the Gap Between Scattering Amplitudes and Events at the LHC at Higher Orders“.
What that somewhat wordy title means is that a mix of people, ranging from quite formal mathematical physicists through to experimentalists like me have been exchanging ideas about how we can more effectively make precise predictions from the Standard Model of particle physics, and confront them with data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The people who made some of the calculations we compared to in my previous post are here, for example.
Here’s a question you might not have asked yourself before. When protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, how often are undetectable particles produced?
Maybe a quick follow up question would be, why does it matter?
A paper I have been working on for several years has just been accepted by the journal for publication, which is nice news to receive while on holiday, and it answers the first question, at least under certain conditions. Louie Corpe already wrote about the paper when the ATLAS collaboration (of which we are both members) first released it and submitted it for publication. Now it is accepted, we will be releasing the data (to HEPdata) and relevant code (to Rivet) as soon as possible, so it can be reused, hopefully widely and for a long time, which was the main point.
Continue readingOn Friday we discussed the mid-term review of the ongoing feasibility study for a huge future circular collider at CERN. I should write more about that whole thing soon, but for now, here’s a link to me and Tara Shears talking about it with Justin Webb on the BBC Radio 4’s today programme. (About 07:50, 5 February, just after thought for the day.)
Hopefully this link works: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z
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