2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

What Can We Expect from the Second Run of LHC in 2015?

In 2015, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin its second three-year run. The highlight of the machine’s spectacularly successful first run was the discovery by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the long-sought Higgs boson, confirming the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives fundamental particles masses and leading to the award of the 2013 Physics Nobel Prize to François Englert and Peter Higgs. After substantial upgrades, LHC will restart at a beam energy of 6.5 TeV, substantially higher than the 3.5–4.0 TeV of the first run. This opens up new discovery potential for the four major experiments that study LHC particle collisions. ATLAS and CMS are sensitive to any new physics that nature may bring, hopefully giving a glimpse into physics that could explain the origin of dark matter, the weakness of gravity, or other puzzling phenomena in our universe. ALICE studies strong interaction and looks at matter as it would have been just after the Big Bang. LHCb is sensitive to extremely rare processes at the level of parts per billion; researchers hope to delve deeper into understanding why nature prefers matter to antimatter. This session will look at what to expect from the LHC’s second run and include an overview of what was learned from the LHC’s first run.