New Results From Large Hadron Collider Run 2: High Precision and Discovery Potential

In 2015, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its second run. The highlight of the machine’s spectacularly successful first run was the discovery of the Higgs boson, confirming the mechanism that gives fundamental particles their mass, recognized by the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs. The LHC restarted in 2015 at 6.5 TeV, a beam energy substantially higher than the 3.5–4.0 TeV of the first run. This opens up new discovery potential for its four major experiments, which hope to give a glimpse into physics that could explain the origin of dark matter, the weakness of gravity, and other puzzling phenomena in our universe. Another of the experiments is sensitive to extremely rare processes at the level of parts per billion and may be able to delve deeper into why nature prefers matter to antimatter. With significant new data recorded in 2016, the eyes of the particle physics world are firmly on the LHC experiments as they build on existing precision measurements and open up new discovery potential. This session presents and discusses the results of the experiments.