LHC students face data drought

摘要

Last November, Sara Bolognesi stood before a committee at the University of Turin in Italy and defended her PhD thesis in experimental high-energy physics. The 180-page document is a treatise on finding the Higgs boson, part of the mechanism believed to endow all other matter with mass. The pages are crammed with dozens of figures and tables, but something is missing: real data.rnThat's because the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva in Switzerland, is broken. The 4.6-billion Swiss franc (US$4.3-billion) collider is designed to accelerate protons to near the speed of light and smash them together in four giant detectors spread around its 27-kilometre circumference.