Many years ago, I heard an old joke, about a drunk outside a bar looking for something underneath a street lamp. A passerby asks what he’s looking for, and he replies that he’s looking for his keys. The passerby asks if this is where he lost them. The drunk replies “No, I dropped them over there in the parking lot, but this is where the light is.”
Scientists at CERN who are looking for particles beyond the predictions of the Standard Model think that, in their search for such particles, they may have made the same mistake the drunk made in the joke. Despite a large boost in beam power, there have been no new discoveries that have not been explainable by the Standard Model. But it could be that the collider is spewing out lots of exotic particles, but the detectors used to observe the products of the proton-proton collisions occurring within the beam are not properly attuned to observe their signals, due either to lack of sensitivity, improper detector location, or misinterpretation of data.
The big experiments at CERN, CMS and ATLAS, were designed to look for signals caused by the decay of the Higgs particle, the particle that, in the hierarchy of the Standard Model, grants mass to all other observed particles. Because the Higgs decays within nanoseconds, it doesn’t move very far before it decays; this signature makes it fairly simple to identify events that appear to be due to a Higgs decay. In the search for the Higgs, signals with this signature were retained for study, while others displaying signals from longer-lived particles were tossed. However, some particles predicted by theories that project beyond the Standard Model are expected to have quite long lifetimes. As such, some researchers have realized that perhaps those anomalous signals could be just the ones that require the most intense analysis.
So, researchers are reprogramming the preliminary data sorting to prevent the discard of signals from longer-lived particles. Of course, this doesn’t help if the particle is so long-lived that it escapes the detector altogether before it decays. In this case, more detectors are needed to pick up signals from such particles. One such detector is being installed along the beam path hundreds of meters from the beam line. Another will look for signals above ground, 70 meters above the CMS experiment.
So Supersymmetry may not be dead quite yet. We’ll have to see if a consistent pattern arises from all that discarded data.
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