This year, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will smash protons together at higher energies than ever before, and nobody knows what will fly out. Physicists have good reason to believe something fundamentally new will appear—new particles like the Higgs boson, new symmetries, or even extra dimensions of space. The problem is that any new signal will be buried under an enormous background of known physics. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are calculating both the background noise and the tiny expected signals from theories of new physics, using everything from pen-and-paper maths to the most powerful supercomputers. Their goal is to help the LHC tell the difference. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new smartphone or a medical device next year. But the last time physicists smashed particles to explore the unknown, they gave us the World Wide Web. A deeper understanding of nature’s most basic forces—the ultimate quest for a Theory of Everything—could, over decades, reshape how we think about matter, energy, and the fabric of reality itself.
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Currently, our understanding of Nature at the most fundamental level is at the crossroads. This year, the LHC at CERN will collide protons at higher energies than ever before, sufficient to explore physics in depth at the TeV scale. Nobody yet knows what these data will reveal. However, there are very good reasons to believe that something fundamentally new will be discovered, which might transform our understanding of basic physics, making the next few years the most exciting time for a generation or more. The discoveries could be new types of particle, such as the Higgs boson, new kinds of symmetries such as supersymmetry, or indeed something even more dramatic such as extra dimensions. Our rolling programme of research in Particle Physics Theory at the University of Edinburgh is designed to be at the forefront of these new discoveries: indeed Peter Higgs himself is Emeritus Professor here. Specifically, we provide theoretical calculations, using pen and paper, and the most powerful supercomputers, of both the huge number of background processes to be seen at LHC due to known physics, and the tiny signals expected in various models of new physics, in order to discriminate between signal and background, and thus maximise the discovery potential of the LHC. In parallel, we will attempt to understand the more complete picture of all the forces of Nature that should begin to emerge, in our ultimate quest for a Theory of Everything.
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