Hold On Higgs - Will 2010 Be the Year of the Neutralino?

The Large Hadron Collider is working its way up to full power, the most eagerly anticipated activation of anything Times Square's balloon drop on December 31st 1999.  Many are eagerly anticipating the Higgs boson, while a few lunatics scream that spacetime will rip (so you should send them money), but a made-up sounding particle could steal the show.  Will 2010 be the year of the Neutralino?

It might read like proof that particle physicists just mash their keyboard and call the result real, but the neutralino could be proof positive of supersymmetry, a theory which makes the Standard Model - core of subatomic science - look like the blurb on the back of the real book.  The supersymmetric theory explains all sorts of problems with current theory by doubling the number of subatomic particles.  Then claiming that most of them ran away.

Most of these supersymmetric particles disintegrated into components as the universe expanded and the energy was spread out - to see them again, we need something that can recreate the energy density near the origin of everything.  While the biggest and baddest of the particles we could access is the Higgs, we could run into the neutralino - the (relatively) low energy supersymmetric partner of the neutrino - into which all other super-particles decayed.

The math tells us that these would shower out of high energy runs at the LHC, while Higgs would be buried in an avalanche of other data.  If observed the new particles would confirm a whole host of heretofore hope-supported supersymmetry suppositions - and if thy aren't, they'll still confirm a lot of other ideas. Science is great like that.

Luke McKinney

Will a Neutralino Steal Higgs Thunder? 

Comments

[Pistachio Wildebeest]

"...we could run into the neutralino - the (relatively) low energy supersymmetric partner of the neutrino..."

This statement is incorrect.

The neutralino is NOT the susy partner of the neutrino.

The lsp neutralino would be a superposition of various mass eigenstates of supersymmetric gauge fields.

[Ramkumar]

can we create dark matter by LHC .Is neutralino the wait less sparticle in the universe in which dark matter is made of .Forget about neutralino LHC had not even the created bosons or fermions .Clines theory predicts that one neutralio bombard one kg of matter once in 10000 days and this also is unproven.A supersymmetric matter cant react with matter and hence its properties will always be hidden .Galaxy rotation problem can be resolved to some extent using modified newtonian dynamics of milgrom than using neutralino hypothysis.

[Cosmogeist]

Jesus chrimany, I'm so sick of hearing about the LHC "powering up" and what we'll discover. ARE THEY EVER GOING TO GET THIS THING REALLY GOING?? First the rediculous setbacks with the magnet frying and then the inability to see common bird droppings being an issue. Now it's taking them a year and beyond to sloooooooowly power the damn thing up. Get it going to full speed, discover what you're going to discover, so we can stop these absurd speculative articles we see each freaking month!!

[Narendra Nath]

I have my doubts about LHC success in identifying the fundamental of all particles that emerged with the Big bang as primordial matter. The problem of visible and dark matter appears tied to the same source, a small part resulted in the Baryon matter while a substantial part has become dark matter. The dark energy component must have originated too as the field component of the Unified Field. Yes, i do feel that the original particle would be a massive neutral one, may even be quark-like!

[Narendra Nath]

I have my doubts about LHC success in identifying the fundamental of all particles that emerged with the Big bang as primordial matter. The problem of visible and dark matter appears tied to the same source, a small part resulted in the Baryon matter while a substantial part has become dark matter. The dark energy component must have originated too as the field component of the Unified Field. Yes, i do feel that the original particle would be a massive neutral one, may even be quark-like!

[Narendra Nath]

I have my doubts about LHC success in identifying the fundamental of all particles that emerged with the Big bang as primordial matter. The problem of visible and dark matter appears tied to the same source, a small part resulted in the Baryon matter while a substantial part has become dark matter. The dark energy component must have originated too as the field component of the Unified Field. Yes, i do feel that the original particle would be a massive neutral one, may even be quark-like!

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Wait till the LHC powers up all the way, clean the bird droppings or whatever out of it, shine it, hang a lucky rabbit's foot or lucky horseshoe on it, then let's see some of that razzamatazz that CERN promised before.