LET'S BUILD A HIGGS FACTORY - ON THE CHEAP

摘要

No sooner has one mammoth accelerator delivered its first big result, than discussions begin on what should replace it. At the annual get together of Nobel prizewinners in Lindau, Germany, all the talk was of whether the Large Hadron Collide is the right instrument to find out what exactly the LHC has found. The problem is that the LHC collides two beams of protons. These particles are made of a melange of quarks and gluons, so when two hit, the result is a confusing array of shrapnel. Finding something that looks like the Higgs boson has required painstaking reconstructions of what was fleetingiy produced in the collisions. Pinning down the new particle's true properties in this confusing environment and reaching a conclusive identification might simply be impossible.