Reality Check at the LHC

This is a wonderful article about what we have obtained so far from the experiments at the LHC, or in particular, at the CMS detector. It seems that from the run of several months, several tighter limits have been imposed on a number of theories.

It is still early days at the LHC, but the 27 km-circumference machine's first year of smashing protons into each other at record energies is beginning to tame theorists' imaginations. Researchers on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, for example, have reported that, at the energies probed so far, quarks do not exhibit substructure (arXiv:1010.4439), exotic particles such as colorons and E6 diquarks have not shown up (arXiv:1010.0203) – and nor have leptoquarks (arXiv:1012.4031) or new heavy gauge bosons (arXiv:1012.5945) either. Although these entities cannot be ruled out completely, LHC data have allowed them less room to hide – principally by allowing researchers to place stringent limits on the particles' masses.

I definitely can't wait for the LHC to really get to the 14 TeV energy. I can see a lot of interesting stuff, even if all it does is rule out a lot of hot air theories floating around.

Oh, btw, notice that the Higgs is barely even mentioned in this article. For anyone who thinks that the LHC has only a single mission to look for this overhyped particle, this article should set you straight once and for all.

Zz.