Physicists around the world (myself included) are hoping that this week will mark the beginning of a new era of discovery. And not, as some fear, the end of particle physics as we know it.
After 27 months of shutdown and re-commissioning, the Large Hadron Collider has begun its much-anticipated "Season 2". Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the first physics data is now being collected in CERN's freshly upgraded detector-temples at the record-breaking collision energy of 13 teraelectonvolts (TeV).
Much has been written about the upgrade to the accelerator, the experiments, and the computing infrastructure required to handle the fresh deluge of data from the new energy frontier. There has also – quite rightly – been a lot of attention paid to the crowning achievement of Run 1: the discovery of the Higgs boson.
But the "elephant in the collider" is this: we knew that Run 1 had to find the Higgs boson – or something like it, and it did. With Run 2, we don't know what we're looking for.
OK, so maybe that's bit of an over-simplification. We certainly have a good few guesses as to what's beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, our current best understanding of matter and forces at the fundamental level that was essentially completed in July 2012.
One of the leading contenders is supersymmetry, a theory that provides a candidate for the dark matter that supposedly makes up some 23% of our universe. As it happens, my PhD was based on the first results from the LHC Run 1 that said we hadn't found evidence for supersymmetry.
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