WIREDGOV

The latest results from Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN  have been presented for the very first time, less than two months after the experiments started to take data at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, following a two-year long shutdown.

The world particle-physics community has convened in Vienna for the 2015 European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP2015), where the latest results in the field are being presented and discussed including the first results from Run 2 of the LHC.

"It is much too early to expect any discovery, we will have to be patient,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “Nevertheless, the LHC experiments have already recorded 100 times more data for the summer conferences this year than they had around the same time after the LHC started up at 7 TeV in 2010. We can sense a fantastic pioneering spirit as the physicists are looking at completely new data at an unexplored energy.”

After only a few weeks of data taking, the experiments have now “rediscovered” all of the known fundamental particles, apart from the Higgs boson, for which more data are still required. The collaborations are thus ready to test the Standard Model at 13 TeV and the hope is to find evidence of new physics beyond this well-established theory.

The highlights of the conference include the CMS experiment announcing their first results at full energy and in addition the LHCb experiment has published a result in Nature confirming that a certain decay involving what is known as the weak nuclear force happens with beauty quarks having a “left-handed” spin. This result is consistent with the Standard Model, in contrast with previous measurements that allowed for a right-handed contribution.

Dr Greig Cowan, an LHCb physicist from Edinburgh University and co-author on the paper, said: “Our results show a clear left-handed bias, which pulls us away from this line of enquiry and indicates that we need to look elsewhere to answer these fundamental questions about the universe.”

For the full release please see the CERN website http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/07/lhc-experiments-present-latest-results-vienna

STFC & CERN
The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) co-ordinates and manages the UK’s involvement and subscription with CERN. The UK’s influence on both CERN Council and CERN Finance Committee is coordinated through the UK Committee on CERN (UKCC). UK membership of CERN gives our physicists and engineers access to the experiments and allows UK industry to bid for contracts, UK nationals to compete for jobs and research positions at CERN, and UK schools and teachers to visit. UK scientists hold many key roles at CERN. Firms in the UK win contracts for work at CERN worth millions of pounds each year. The impact of winning contracts is often even greater as it enables companies to win business elsewhere.

Corinne Mosese
STFC Media Officer
01793 442870