Unless Europe’s Large Hadron Collider coughs up a surprise, the field of particle physics may wheeze to its end
A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass.
Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King’s College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. “It’s going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out.
The LHC was supposed to break that impasse. In its ring, protons circulating in opposite directions crash together at energies nearly seven times as high as at any previous collider, enabling the LHC to produce particles too massive to be made elsewhere. A decade ago many physicists envisioned quickly spotting marvels including new force-carrying particles or even mini–black holes.
That physics cuts both ways, however. The Higgs boson’s mass ought to be pulled dramatically upward by other standard model particles in the vacuum—especially the top quark, a heavier version of the up quark that weighs 184 times as much as the proton. That doesn’t happen, so theorists have reasoned that at least one other new particle with a similar mass and just the right properties—in particular, a different spin—must exist in the vacuum to “naturally” counter the effects of the top quark.
Similarly, experiments elsewhere suggest the muon might be very slightly more magnetic than the standard model predicts . That anomaly can be explained by the existence of exotic particles called leptoquarks, which might already be hiding undetected in the LHC’s output, Ellis says.
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