Hidden Valley Workshop May 11, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Conference, Hidden Valley, physics.3 comments
I spent a very enjoyable week attending a workshop here at UW – Workshop on Signatures of Long-Lived Exotic Particles at the LHC. These workshops are funded by the DOE – and allow us to fly in a small list of experts to discuss a particular topic for a week. As you might imagine, things can get pretty intense (in a good way!).
The point about long lived particles is they are long lived! And not much else in the standard model is long lived the way these guys can be. Sure, a bottom quark might travel a few millimeters – and most of us tend to call that long-lived. But the things considered at this workshop can go much furthers – meters even. All sorts of models can generate these particles – like SUSY or Hidden Valley.
Nothing in a particle physics experiment is really designed for these things – not the hardware and not the software, certainly. Not clear our brains are thinking about them too well either! This is part of what makes them so fascinating!
Take the hardware, for example. Just about everything in the Standard Model decays very quickly after it is created in a collider. Millimeters:
That is an exploded schematic view of what happens in our detector (this is a CDF event, I’ve stolen, from Fermilab). The inner circle on the left is about 2 inches in diameter. You see the exploded view on the right? The distance between the vertex and the secondary vertex is about a millimeter or so. That is normal long lived particle for particle physics. All of our code and the design of our detectors are built to discover exactly those kinds of long lived particles.
That picture is from the small conference dinner we set up at Anthony’s, a local nice fish place here in Seattle. I’ve got more pictures from the dinner posted on my flickr account.
