(Credit CERN)
To see the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider installed in the CERN LHC tunnel is quite a sight. These magnets, along with the towering components of the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, represent the very near future of my field. Each of these is a component in a discovery factory, an engine colliding protons and imaging energy and matter as it would have existed billionths of a second after the Big Bang. The thousands of physicists who will study this data are organized into smaller groups, usually by interest or ambition. Some physicists want to look for the Higgs, but even that is not a singular topic. Many graduate students, post docs, and professors will distinguish themselves by looking for Higgs as it might couple to different quarks, or different leptons. Dozens of searches, just for the elusive Higgs boson, will occupy hundreds of physicists as they compete and cooperate to search for this messenger of creation.
Other physicists will search for evidence of supersymmetry, an as yet unrealized but possible symmetry of nature which, while simplifying the underlying structure of the universe, at least DOUBLES the number of fundamental particles. As you can imagine, looking for squarks, or sleptons (supersymmetric quarks and leptons), or charged Higgs bosons (also evidence of a supersymmetric universe). There will also be physicists who pursue evidence of miniature black holes, or extra space dimensions beyond the familar three of everyday experience. There will be physicists who also search out predictions of the Standard Model, including the behavior of high energy hadron jets and the behavior of massive or high-energy leptons.
The LHC is more than a single collider with a single purpose. It is a buffet of cosmic possibilities, a means by which our species can peel back yet another thin veil hiding the structure of this universe. All of this, from the gentle curvature of a concrete tunnel, the soft blue of superconducting magnets.
