LHC spots particle that may be new form of matter - physics-math - 10 April 2014 - New Scientist

LHC spots particle that may be new form of matter - physics-math - 10 April 2014 - New Scientist: Now that Z(4430)'s existence is confirmed, the next challenge is to work out whether it really is a tetraquark.

There is at least one reason why physicists can be hopeful. The other suspected tetraquarks might simply be loosely bound pairs of mesons, says Marek Karliner, a theorist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, who was not part of the team. Z(4430) is different because its mass does not seem to allow for this.

Physicists propose factory to spew out Higgs particles

Physicists propose factory to spew out Higgs particles:   Muons are particles similar to electrons, but 200 times more massive. That means a muon-antimuon accelerator could reach the necessary energies over a far shorter distance.

With the putative Higgs checking in at about 125 gigaelectronvolts, you would need to bash together a muon and an antimuon with each having just over 60 GeV of energy. "That should be doable with a machine 100 times smaller than the LHC," says Rubbia. The result would be a "Higgs factory" producing the particle and little else.

What if there is no Higgs boson?

What if there is no Higgs boson?:  Physicists are only looking for the Higgs particle because it is the easiest way to access the field. If they don't see it, then it suggests the field is different from the one predicted by the standard model. Normally, particles in fields are like ripples in ponds – photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field, for example. But if the field is more like molasses than water, then the ripples die away too quickly for us to detect.

That means matter might get its mass from a thick Higgs-like field that has no associated particle. To get such a goopy field, theorists need to add in more exotic possibilities – such as new particles or forces of nature...

The existence of a new force, called technicolour, could also give particles mass without the need for a Higgs boson. Technicolour would act like a heavy-duty version of the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together in the nuclei of atoms. The technicolour force would fill space with pairs of still more new particles, which would form a soup through which other particles would travel, gaining mass in the process....

The existence of a fourth dimension of space, beyond the three we experience, could explain why particles have different masses – a fact that is usually attributed to the Higgs boson.

Short Sharp Science: LHC not yet a supersymmetry killer

Short Sharp Science: LHC not yet a supersymmetry killer: Last week, however, anticipated signs of SUSY were missing from the early data generated by the LHC's two experiments, ATLAS and CMS. Is there really cause for concern?

As described in Physics World, ATLAS and CMS have been exploring a particular version of supersymmetry called the constrained minimal supersymmetric standard model (CMSSM) with minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) - the easiest one to study.

And it is within this context that these experiments have so far failed to uncover evidence for SUSY. They have found no squarks and gluinos with a mass of less than 700 giga-electronvolts (GeV).

Exotic matter could show up in the LHC this year - physics-math - 08 September 2010 - New Scientist

Exotic matter could show up in the LHC this year: "Typical SUSY models assume heavy superpartners for the gluon and quarks, and a light neutral particle as a candidate for dark matter. But since the true masses of sparticles are uncertain, Matchev's team considered hundreds of possible masses for them, and worked out the routes by which they could decay into lighter objects."

Watching God play dice: The Large Hadron Collider

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225761.200-watching-god-play-dice-the-large-hadron-collider.html