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The LHC is on turning on again! What does that mean?

Deep underground, on the border between Switzerland and France, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is starting back up again after a 4 year hiatus. Today, July 5th, the LHC had its first full energy collisions since 2018.  Whenever the LHC is running is exciting enough on its own, but this new run of data taking will also feature several upgrades to the LHC itself as well as the several different experiments that make use of its collisions. The physics world will be watching to see if the data from this new run confirms any of the interesting anomalies seen in previous datasets or reveals any other unexpected discoveries. 

New and Improved

During the multi-year shutdown the LHC itself has been upgraded. Noticably the energy of the colliding beams has been increased, from 13 TeV to 13.6 TeV. Besides breaking its own record for the highest energy collisions every produced, this 5% increase to the LHC’s energy will give a boost to searches looking for very rare high energy phenomena. The rate of collisions the LHC produces is also expected to be roughly 50% higher  previous maximum achieved in previous runs. At the end of this three year run it is expected that the experiments will have collected twice as much data as the previous two runs combined. 

The experiments have also been busy upgrading their detectors to take full advantage of this new round of collisions.

The ALICE experiment had the most substantial upgrade. It features a new silicon inner tracker, an upgraded time projection chamber, a new forward muon detector, a new triggering system and an improved data processing system. These upgrades will help in its study of exotic phase of matter called the quark gluon plasma, a hot dense soup of nuclear material present in the early universe. 

 

A diagram showing the various upgrades to the ALICE detector (source)

ATLAS and CMS, the two ‘general purpose’ experiments at the LHC, had a few upgrades as well. ATLAS replaced their ‘small wheel’ detector used to measure the momentum of muons. CMS replaced the inner most part its inner tracker, and installed a new GEM detector to measure muons close to the beamline. Both experiments also upgraded their software and data collection systems (triggers) in order to be more sensitive to the signatures of potential exotic particles that may have been missed in previous runs. 

The new ATLAS ‘small wheel’ being lowered into place. (source)

The LHCb experiment, which specializes in studying the properties of the bottom quark, also had major upgrades during the shutdown. LHCb installed a new Vertex Locator closer to the beam line and upgraded their tracking and particle identification system. It also fully revamped its trigger system to run entirely on GPU’s. These upgrades should allow them to collect 5 times the amount of data over the next two runs as they did over the first two. 

Run 3 will also feature a new smaller scale experiment, FASER, which will study neutrinos produced in the LHC and search for long-lived new particles. 

What will we learn?

One of the main goals in particle physics now is direct experimental evidence of a phenomena unexplained by the Standard Model. While very successful in many respects, the Standard Model leaves several mysteries unexplained such as the nature of dark matter, the imbalance of matter over anti-matter, and the origin of neutrino’s mass. All of these are questions many hope that the LHC can help answer.

Much of the excitement for Run-3 of the LHC will be on whether the additional data can confirm some of the deviations from the Standard Model which have been seen in previous runs.

One very hot topic in particle physics right now are a series of ‘flavor anomalies‘ seen by the LHCb experiment in previous LHC runs. These anomalies are deviations from the Standard Model predictions of how often certain rare decays of the b quarks should occur. With their dataset so far, LHCb has not yet had enough data to pass the high statistical threshold required in particle physics to claim a discovery. But if these anomalies are real, Run-3 should provide enough data to claim a discovery.

A summary of the various measurements making up the ‘flavor anomalies’. The blue lines and error bars indicate the measurements and their uncertainties. The yellow line and error bars indicates the standard model predictions and their uncertainties. Source

There are also a decent number ‘excesses’, potential signals of new particles being produced in LHC collisions, that have been seen by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. The statistical significance of these excesses are all still quite low, and many such excesses have gone away with more data. But if one or more of these excesses was confirmed in the Run-3 dataset it would be a massive discovery.

While all of these anomalies are gamble, this new dataset will also certainly be used to measure various known entities with better precision, improving our understanding of nature no matter what. Our understanding of the Higgs boson, the top quark, rare decays of the bottom quark, rare standard model processes, the dynamics of the quark gluon plasma and many other areas will no doubt improve from this additional data.

In addition to these ‘known’ anomalies and measurements, whenever an experiment starts up again there is also the possibility of something entirely unexpected showing up. Perhaps one of the upgrades performed will allow the detection of something entirely new, unseen in previous runs. Perhaps FASER will see signals of long-lived particles missed by the other experiments. Or perhaps the data from the main experiments will be analyzed in a new way, revealing evidence of a new particle which had been missed up until now.

No matter what happens, the world of particle physics is a more exciting place when the LHC is running. So lets all cheers to that!

Read More:

CERN Run-3 Press Event / Livestream Recording “Join us for the first collisions for physics at 13.6 TeV!“

Symmetry Magazine “What’s new for LHC Run 3?”

CERN Courier “New data strengthens RK flavour anomaly“

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A symphony of data

Article title: “MUSiC: a model unspecific search for new physics in
proton-proton collisions at \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV”

Authors: The CMS Collaboration

Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02984

First of all, let us take care of the spoilers: no new particles or phenomena have been found… Having taken this concern away, let us focus on the important concept behind MUSiC.

ATLAS and CMS, the two largest experiments using collisions at the LHC, are known as “general purpose experiments” for a good reason. They were built to look at a wide variety of physical processes and, up to now, each has checked dozens of proposed theoretical extensions of the Standard Model, in addition to checking the Model itself. However, in almost all cases their searches rely on definite theory predictions and focus on very specific combinations of particles and their kinematic properties. In this way, the experiments may still be far from utilizing their full potential. But now an algorithm named MUSiC is here to help.

MUSiC takes all events recorded by CMS that comprise of clean-cut particles and compares them against the expectations from the Standard Model, untethering itself from narrow definitions for the search conditions.

We should clarify here that an “event” is the result of an individual proton-proton collision (among the many happening each time the proton bunches cross), consisting of a bouquet of particles. First of all, MUSiC needs to work with events with particles that are well-recognized by the experiment’s detectors, to cut down on uncertainty. It must also use particles that are well-modeled, because it will rely on the comparison of data to simulation and, so, wants to be sure about the accuracy of the latter.

Display of an event with two muons at CMS. (Source: CMS experiment)

All this boils down to working with events with combinations of specific, but several, particles: electrons, muons, photons, hadronic jets from light-flavour (=up, down, strange) quarks or gluons and from bottom quarks, and deficits in the total transverse momentum (typically the signature of the uncatchable neutrinos or perhaps of unknown exotic particles). And to make things even more clean-cut, it keeps only events that include either an electron or a muon, both being well-understood characters.

These particles’ combinations result in hundreds of different “final states” caught by the detectors. However, they all correspond to only a dozen combos of particles created in the collisions according to the Standard Model, before some of them decay to lighter ones. For them, we know and simulate pretty well what we expect the experiment to measure.

MUSiC proceeded by comparing three kinematic quantities of these final states, as measured by CMS during the year 2016, to their simulated values. The three quantities of interest are the combined mass, combined transverse momentum and combined missing transverse momentum. It’s in their distributions that new particles would most probably show up, regardless of which theoretical model they follow. The range of values covered is pretty wide. All in all, the method extends the kinematic reach of usual searches, as it also does with the collection of final states.

An example distribution from MUSiC: Transverse mass for the final state comprising of one muon and missing transverse momentum. Color histograms: Simulated Standard Model processes. Red line: Signal from a hypothetical W’ boson with mass of 3TeV. (Source: paper)

So the kinematic distributions are checked against the simulated expectations in an automatized way, with MUSiC looking for every physicist’s dream: deviations. Any deviation from the simulation, meaning either fewer or more recorded events, is quantified by getting a probability value. This probability is calculated by also taking into account the much dreaded “look elsewhere effect”. (Which comes from the fact that, statistically, in a large number of distributions a random fluctuation that will mimic a genuine deviation is bound to appear sooner or later.)

When all’s said and done the collection of probabilities is overviewed. The MUSiC protocol says that any significant deviation will be scrutinized with more traditional methods – only that this need never actually arose in the 2016 data: all the data played along with the Standard Model, in all 1,069 examined final states and their kinematic ranges.

For the record, the largest deviation was spotted in the final state comprising three electrons, two generic hadronic jets and one jet coming from a bottom quark. Seven events were counted whereas the simulation gave 2.7±1.8 events (mostly coming from the production of a top plus an anti-top quark plus an intermediate vector boson from the collision; the fractional values are due to extrapolating to the amount of collected data). This excess was not seen in other related final states, “related” in that they also either include the same particles or have one less. Everything pointed to a fluctuation and the case was closed.

However, the goal of MUSiC was not strictly to find something new, but rather to demonstrate a method for model un-specific searches with collisions data. The mission seems to be accomplished, with CMS becoming even more general-purpose.

Read more:

Another generic search method in ATLAS: Going Rogue: The Search for Anything (and Everything) with ATLAS

And a take with machine learning: Letting the Machines Seach for New Physics

Fancy checking a good old model-specific search? Uncovering a Higgs Hiding Behind Backgrounds