The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland has successfully completed the first part of recording new events at 13 TeV, the highest energy ever produced by mankind.
At the `End of the Year’ seminar at CERN, the ATLAS collaboration presented 28 new analysis results using the full data statistics collected in 2015.
Liverpool Particle Physicist, Professor Max Klein, said: “This is a great achievement for ATLAS, and also for the Liverpool team –The group has contributed to several of these analyses and worked hard to achieve the outstanding performance of detector, data preparation and computing systems”.
Among these results, a search in the photon-pair channel reports an interesting clustering of events at a mass of 750 GeV.
Dr Uta Klein, from the Department of Physics, said: “Resonances in leptons, quarks or photons have a strong track-record for discovery and our group is significantly contributing to searches of this kind. It is too early to speculate on what we observe, but it raises the enthusiasm to search even further for exotics physics using new LHC data”.
Several searches for new particles arising from Supersymmetry, one of the most compelling theory for new physics beyond the standard model, are also among the results reported .
Monica D’Onofrio, Reader in Physics, added: “With just one-sixth of the statistics collected in Run 1 at the LHC, thanks to the higher energy, we have pushed the boundaries on several SUSY particles, with stringent constraints on their masses. In one case, we also see an interesting deviation from SM predictions that confirms a Run 1 tantalizing result in the same final state events”.
“It is too early to get really excited. Modest excesses are expected when looking everywhere as ATLAS physicists do.”
“This happens at the time when ATLAS collaboration, with strong contributions from the Liverpool group, prepares for the long-term future with a major upgrade of its detector system. The results reported today show how huge the potential for discovery is at the LHC for 2016 and beyond. Watch out for more news to come!”
[