large hadron collider

A portion of the Large Hadron Collider stretches along a tunnel at CERN'S accelerator complex, outside of Geneva. The LHC is due to start up again in March 2015, when researchers will begin hunting for gluinos -- particles that could lead to insights about dark matter.

(CERN)

Let's get this particle-hunting party started, shall we?

In March, the Large Hadron Collider will fire up once again -- this time doubling its collision energy.

What's so great about the doubling? It'll put the particle accelerator into an operational realm in which it can search for evidence of supersymmetry, or SUSY.

SUSY is an extension of physics' Standard Model theory, which describes the fundamental particles, or building blocks, of matter in the universe and how they interact. SUSY helps fill in gaps in the Standard Model.

As far as particles go, you may have heard of photons, which are particles that carry light energy, or quarks, which are particles that make up an atom's protons and neutrons. SUSY predicts such particles come with partners -- photinos for photons and squarks for quarks.

Next month, LHC scientists will go looking for one of these partners, a gluino, which you could say is the yin to a gluon's yang. And gluons are the stuff that "glues" quarks together inside protons and neutrons.

Finding a gluino would be more exciting than detecting the Higgs boson, Beate Heinemann told BBC News recently. Heinemann is a spokeswoman for the ATLAS* experiment, one of LHC's particle detectors, and a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley.

The reason for the excitement is that detecting evidence of a gluino could put scientists on a path to understanding that elusive cosmic stuff called dark matter, which cannot be seen by telescopes but appears to exist based on the motions of galaxies and other astronomical objects.

What LHC's detectors would "see" of a gluino wouldn't be the particle itself but rather its decay products, namely a neutralino -- and that's the stuff that's thought to make up dark matter.

So, come on now, LHC scientists, start those particle-accelerating engines!

-- Susannah L. Bodman, sbodman@oregonian.com, www.facebook.com/Sciwhat.Science, Twitter: @Sciwhat

(*And I thought NASA loved its acronyms. ATLAS stands for "A Toroidal LHC Apparatus," and a toroid happens to be anything that's doughnut or O-shaped.)