A team of researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary has completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of collisions at the LHC.
The paper, submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics by members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, shows that collisions thus far have produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons. The researchers found that the number of those particles increased faster with collision energy than was predicted by their models. In light of these findings, researchers must fine tine their predictions of how many mesons will be found during high energy collisions, to better enable them to distinguish these particles from the more rare particles that the experiment is seeking.
“If we’re looking for rare particles later on, these mesons will be in the background,” said Gunther Roland, MIT associate professor of physics and an author of the new paper.
The CMS team has 45 members from the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science’s Particle Physics Collaboration and includes faculty, students and research scientists.
[Source: MIT News Office]
