Parton Distributions Prime LHC Users for Collisions

摘要

The Physics Top Ten this period includes for the first time a paper, #8, that provides a tool kit for the analysis of the collision data expected from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In September 2008, the LHC suffered a serious malfunction that halted the circulation of particle beams for over a year. As of now, however, the LHC, together with its enormous experimental detectors, is performing exceptionally well, with 3.5 TeV proton beams producing 7 TeV collisions. The LHC is closing in on the goal of the direct exploration of physics at the TeV scale.rnTheorists at CERN are quietly confident that groundbreaking discoveries will be found in the early data, which would have profound implications for the future of particle physics.