The first year at the large hadron collider
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EMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS Experiment
The First Year at the Large Hadron Collider* A. M. Zaitsev* Institute of High-Energy Physics, Protvino, Russia Received March 21, 2008
Abstract—The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers unprecedented opportunities to study in detail interactions in the unexplored energy range around 1 TeV, where new physical phenomena undoubtedly exist. The luminosity expected in the first year of LHC operation will make it possible to thoroughly tune and calibrate physical facilities, clear up characteristics of the main, most intense processes, and search for new entities, such as the Higgs boson, light supersymmetric particles, and new heavy gauge bosons, with a sensitivity high enough to allow their observation. PACS numbers: 14.80.-j DOI: 10.1134/S1063778808120132
1. INTRODUCTION The long expected start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is irreversibly approaching. In this connection, possible evolution in the first years of its running and expected results of the first measurements are more and more often discussed. Though prospects for priority studies at the LHC have been reviewed in a number of remarkable works [1–7], extensiveness and current importance of this topic and potential significance of the coming studies make it necessary to have another thorough look at the near future of this tremendous project. The history of the LHC is more than one decade long. As far back as the early 1970s, in the first discussions of the e+ e− collider LEP at CERN, there arose an idea of making the tunnel for this facility wide enough to allow accommodation of a future proton collider. √ Construction of a hadron collider for the energy S = 10 TeV and higher grew particularly important after elaboration of the theory of electroweak interactions and discovery of the Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking. It became clear that new physical phenomena inevitably occur √ at energies of elementary interactions around s ≈ 1 TeV. These ideas are brightly set forth in the work by Okun’ [8], from which the following two citations are taken: “At present, the scalarland exists only in the dreams of theoreticians, who describe it in many ways, which are quite far from being self-consistent. The aim of this talk is to urge experimentalists and accelerator builders to join their efforts in discovering this land, which lies below and not far above 1 TeV.” *
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“During the last 50 years, physicists solve problems by inventing hypothetical particles, which eventually become real. It took 14 years to discover the first hypothetical spinless particle: the pion. It is now precisely 14 years that we live with a new type of hypothetical spinless bosons. Isn’t it about time to discover them?” It is in place to note, in the spirit of this numerology, that the quantum of 14 years goes into the period of time from the moment when the Higgs boson appeared in the electroweak model (1967) to the assumed moment of its discovery (2009) exactly three times. The first rather elaborated considerations for the LHC a
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