The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, according to CERN’s official website.
Last Friday, David Gross, director and holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, spoke about the potential impact the LHC could have on the field of physics in his lecture title “The Coming Revolution in Fundamental Physics.”
The LHC will provide incite into a theory that the weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetic force and gravity will become equal in strength at a certain, very high, energy level, according to Gross.
“A very important clue which we hold on to with dear life is that the forces are going to be unified,” Gross said. “[That] they actually are all the same strength and naturally fit together at very high energy.”
But even if the unification theory is correct, the LHC will not provide concrete evidence of its existence because it cannot generate enough power to unify the forces, according to Gross. “Energy scale unification is many many orders of magnitude shorter distance, higher energy than where we do observation. The LHC takes us a little bit to higher energy but still a long way away from here [the energy scale unification].”
But even with the energy scale unification out of reach, Gross has hopes the LHC will give some concrete answers.
“We hope to discover something very monumental at the LHC and that’s called ‘Supersymmetry,'” Gross said. “A new and different kind of symmetry which some of us believe will be shortly discovered in Geneva.”
Supersymmetry is a theory that says for every type of one particle (a boson) there is a particle of the same mass and internal quantum numbers (a fermion) that spins a different way, according to Gross.
Supersymmetry may be the key to reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, according to Hitoshi Murayama, the newly appointed Director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at University of Tokyo.
Peter Palmer, a UConn Alumni graduating with a Physics degree, said that he was skeptical that the LHC will deliver on all the questions scientists are saying it will solve.
“They will find some answers but might not be to problems they were trying to solve,” Gross said. “We are always looking deeper into matter and I don’t see that we are at the bottom yet. CERN has taken a step but it is not yet to that to that provable position yet.”