Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 72: A super-heavy particle?

　　"Strange?" Approaching over, Joannes stared at the computer screen for a while and frowned slightly, "...... It's indeed quite strange, isn't the experiment we did a collision in the 1-10 GeV energy zone? How come the data is going up to 1TeV?"

　　Saying that, Joannes cast an enquiring glance towards Professor Greer.

　　The conversion between TeV and GeV was 1:1000, which was equivalent to the particle beam stream in the collider pit, and the energy of the collision had reached 1000 GeV. while the collision energy needed to find a pentaquark state particle, 6 GeV was enough.

　　In order to search for a particle in the 6 GeV energy region, the collision energy was turned up to more than 1000 GeV, which was like hitting a mosquito with a cannon.

　　However, hearing Joannes' question, Professor Greer laughed and explained in a tone as if nothing had happened.

　　"As I said, the condition of the orbit is being tested right now, it's not an official experiment. As for why it's on so much, you have to understand CERN's love for getting this new toy. If it weren't for the limited budget for this experiment, they'd even be prepared to show you peers a collision above the 10 TeV energy region."

　　To put it frankly, it's all about showing off.

　　Imagine all the theoretical physicists and high-energy physics labs in the world with their eyes on this place. If you don't take this opportunity to show off, won't it be a waste of the billions spent on expanding the track?

　　Without letting the particle clusters inside the collider blast a bit, how can we let others know how awesome our machine is?

　　However, CERN does have the capital to show off, it is said that in the limit, after the expansion of the Hadron Collider can even do 14TeV collision experiment. That is to say, each particle running in orbit will carry 7 TeV of energy.

　　How scary is this energy?

　　In many cases this unit of energy (according to the mass-energy conversion formula) is also used to describe the mass of the particle, for example 1 hydrogen atom has a mass of roughly 1 GeV, while the Higgs particle discovered in '12 was 125 GeV.

　　"...... I don't mean that the energy band of the experiment is strange," Orion's finger almost poked the computer screen, "haven't you all noticed that near 750 GeV here, there's an anomalous impact phenomenon."

　　"It's not called an impact phenomenon, it's just a single two-photon signal, but it does seem a bit odd why it's in the 750 GeV energy region." Professor Greer rubbed his chin, "But strange as it is, it's not that uncommon for this to occur, we can always observe some special signals on the ATLAS detector, but the data reacting to the statistical image could be nothing more than a 'noise'."

　　"Is that common?" Orion asked, still staring at the anomaly in the screen.

　　"Quite common," Joannes nodded, "We understand less than 1% of all signals generated by proton beam collisions. So, we usually speculate on the conclusions and then seek proof through experiments, you'll get used to it if you spend a lot of time here."

　　High-energy physics itself is a very metaphysical thing.

　　Since existence below the atomic level is not "directly observable", in order to be sure that a particle really exists, a very important metric is involved - the confidence interval.

　　This is a statistical concept.

　　In high-energy physics experiments, less than 3 times the standard deviation is called "indication", more than 3 times is called "evidence", and more than 5 times is called "discovery". Although words like "breakthrough" and " significant discovery" often appear in the news, most of the cases are actually just " indications".