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TheDailyGalaxy

No significant signs of new physics with the present data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, but it takes only 1 significant deviation in the data to change everything. First collisions of protons at the world’s largest science experiment are expected to start the first or second week of June, according to a senior research scientist with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

“It will be about another six weeks to commission the machine, and many things can still happen on the way,” said physicist Albert De Roeck, a staff member at CERN and a professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and UC Davis, California. De Roeck is a leading scientist on CMS, one of the Large Hadron Collider’s key experiments.The LHC in early April was restarted for its second three-year run after a two-year pause to upgrade the machine to operate at higher energies. At higher energy, physicists worldwide expect to see new discoveries about the laws that govern our natural universe.

De Roeck made the comments Monday while speaking during an international meeting of more than 250 physicists from 30 countries on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

“There are no significant signs of new physics yet,” De Roeck said of the data from the first run, adding however that especially SUSY diehards — physicists who predict the existence of a unique new theory of space and time called SuperSymmetry – maintain hopes of seeing evidence soon of that theory.

De Roeck in fact has high expectations for the possibility of new discoveries that could change the current accepted theory of physical reality, the Standard Model.

“It will take only one significant deviation in the data to change everything,” De Roeck said. “The upgraded machine works. Now we have to get to the real operation for physics.” But work remains to be done. One issue the accelerator physicists remain cautiously aware of, he said, is an “Unidentified Lying Object” in the beam pipe of the LHC’s 17-mile underground tunnel, a vacuum tube where proton beams collide and scatter particles that scientists then analyze for keys to unlock the mysteries of the Big Bang and the cosmos.

Because the proton beam is sensitive to the geometry of the environment and can be easily blocked, the beam pipe must be free of even the tiniest amount of debris. Even something as large as a nitrogen particle could disrupt the beam. Because the beam pipe is a sealed vacuum it’s impossible to know what the “object” is.

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