Not Sitting on our Laurels… Wait, we have no Laurels!

The LHC hasn’t delivered its first collisions yet. ATLAS and CMS haven’t taken collider data yet. But we already have to plan for the next steps. There was a recent kickoff event at CERN for people working on the upgrade to the LHC – the so-called SLHC (Super Large Hadron Collider).

That picture above is a simulation of what the CMS tracker would look like at a luminosity of 10^35 – that is 4 orders of magnitude greater than what we expect to be running at by the middle of 2009. Being able to reconstruct that many particles is going to require both experiments to replace their tracking detectors with more robust and more accurate detectors. This takes years and years to prepare for – the R&D for much of the replacement is already well underway. They are talking about installing these new detectors in 2013 – 5 years from now.

The accelerator talk is also fascinating — but my favorite talk was from MLM who was summarizing some of the physics possibilities of the SLHC:

While there is no guarantee that any deviation from the Standard Model will be found, the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model will demand and fully justify these studies: we’ll be measuring the properties, however trivial, of something which we know exists, as opposed to blindly looking for “we don’t know what” as we are unfortunately doing today!

Worth a look if you are curious about the next step!