LHC portal

"If we go to higher energies in February, there is a good chance the Higgs will be found,"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ision.html

I Used to think that all they need to do was run the sucker for a while pick out a few events and say yay I found it, write the paper and pick up the Nobel.
There is a lot more to it than that.
They need to collect many many ^ many events to collect enough statistical data to 'prove' that they are seeing a Higgs or a black hole or new physics. Much computing required hence the grid and distributed scientific computer centers around the world crunching the data.
So my totally uniformed gut feeling is 2 years to get the data and another 6 months to analyse and publish results.
Any takers?

Yes, you need a statistical proof, even if later we could show picture of "the first whatever-particle detected". You still need to be sure that it is not a coincidencce.

It would be actually better if two experimental setup could prove a new particle. Hence ATLAS and CMS for instance ^^.

This presumes there is a Higgs to find. If there is, the time to discovery really depends on the mass of the Higgs. Its mass directly determines what particles it decays to, and that determines how hard it is to see.

I.e. in some mass regions it goes to 2 photons (hard), whereas in others it goes to four elecrons, muons, or two of each (easy).

LHC_Insider wrote:This presumes there is a Higgs to find. If there is, the time to discovery really depends on the mass of the Higgs. Its mass directly determines what particles it decays to, and that determines how hard it is to see.

I.e. in some mass regions it goes to 2 photons (hard), whereas in others it goes to four elecrons, muons, or two of each (easy).

I think that might be covered under 'New physics' ie; all present theories fail and it's time for new ones.

The Higgs is one of the least ambitious thing they hope to find out - I expect there to be a huge media storm if they do make black holes or somehow find proofs for string theory.

Stephen wrote:The Higgs is one of the least ambitious thing they hope to find out - I expect there to be a huge media storm if they do make black holes or somehow find proofs for string theory.

I thought the major problem with String Theory was that it was unprovable ?

Here is a llink to a nice summary of the questions they're hoping to answer -

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/WhyLHC-en.html

[quote=I thought the major problem with String Theory was that it was unprovable ?[/quote]

The "size" (or "scale" if you want) of strings is a multiple order of magnitudes smaller then the scale reachable by LHC energies. As a consequence no direct observation of strings will be possible by the LHC's experiments. Any proof of string theory would be by finding results that can only be explained by string theory, and not by the standard model or SUSY, and then still there might pop up some other theory that can explain the results.

PS: also the proof of the existence of Higgs particle or black holes is "indirect" by analyzing the decay products (many "measured" items are not directly decaying from the Higgs or black hole but are only created after multiple decays). Take a look at the LHC-portal homepage picture showing such a decay for a black hole ... it is by measuring the multitude of the decay products and the total energy produced by them, accounting for the "lost" energy eg by neutrino's that do not interact with any of the measuring devices etc and then comparing that to what the theory predicts that a "measurement" of Higgs or black hole is made. Also there are measurement errors due to particles interacting with non-measuring parts of the detectors (like constrcution elements, wiring, electronics, ...) causing energy to get lost without being measured, so many events need to be generated and analyzed statistically to get to a "reliable" measurement