Sep 25 2014
The Higgs boson is just the start. With the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) about to increase from 8 to 13 TeV, the search for other, as-yet-unobserved particles will soon be on.
This week, 140 physicists from around the world are meeting in St Catherine's College, Oxford, to plan their new-particle search strategies with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.
The Run-2 Supersymmetry Workshop of the ATLAS experiment is the planning meeting for the searches for Supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider.
Supersymmetry is a theoretically compelling extension to the "Standard Model" of particle physics, which predicts that each particle already discovered has a partner particle with a different amount of angular momentum (spin). The higher energy of the LHC collisions will greatly improve sensitivity to these supersymmetric partner particles.
Of particular interest is the search for new heavy particles which might be responsible for "Dark Matter". This substance has been proposed by astronomers, who believe it makes up 80% of the matter in the universe.