Next week, engineers at the Large Hadron Collider will prepare the particle-smasher to run at 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) – half the energy it was designed for. So what will it find?
, a member of the CMS collaboration, which operates one of the four experiments at the LHC, says the first few months should generate accurate measurements of the properties of particles like the W and Z bosons and the top quark.
Particles that hint at extra dimensions or supersymmetry could also be discovered during the run, provided they are light enough – although probably not until at least the latter half of 2010, he says. Higgs particles in the lighter predicted range could be produced, but they may be hidden by background signals.
After two years at 7 TeV, the collider will be shut down for the whole of 2012 to check the splices between the superconducting magnets, one of which failed disastrously in 2008. In 2013 the energy will be ramped up to its maximum of 14 TeV. The LHC’s operators are being cautious, “but given what happened in 2008, who can blame them?” says Jon Butterworth of the UK collaboration, another LHC experiment.
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