## Monday, April 25, 2016

### 5,000 cernettes with $$750\GeV$$ may be found in the LHC trash bins each year

The excess of the diphoton events whose invariant mass is apparently $$750\GeV$$, the decay products of the hypothetical new "cernette" particles, is arguably the most convincing or most tantalizing existing experimental hint of the Beyond the Standard Model physics at the LHC right now. I estimate the probability that a new particle (or new particles) exists in that region to be 50%.

Nude Socialist just posted an interesting story
Hacking the LHC to sift trash could help find a mystery particle
about a possibly clever idea to dramatically increase the sensitivity of the LHC to the "cernettes" that was reported in a fresh hep-ex preprint
Turning the LHC Ring into a New Physics Search Machine
by 4 physicists from Iowa, Helsinki, and CERN that include Risto Orava. Orava is a cute region in the Northwestern Slovak countryside (pix) where Elon Musk just built Tesla Orava, a company producing some incredibly hot futuristic high-tech products including the Color Oravan TV that I can already/still offer you. Tesla Czechoslovakia just succeeded in selling 100,000 new vinyl record players to Japan. (Everyone laughs now.) The Japanese bought them as carousels for puppet shows.

Orava was also the destination of the man who caught Joey from the Swamps (0:08). OK, I have no idea whether this Finnish physicist has Slovak roots but I should return to more serious matters.

Because the confidence was around 4 sigma per experiment and in 2016, the total number of collisions should be greater by a factor of 6-10 than in 2015, maybe, we could get up to $$4\times \sqrt{10}\sim 12$$ sigma per experiment. But it's still just dozens of cernettes and we need to wait to the late summer to exceed 5 sigma.

In their paper written in Microsoft Word (which is hopefully not as stupid as most preprints written in Word rather than $$\rm\LaTeX$$), Orava and pals propose to use the protons from the trash bins to find thousands of cernettes per year. How is it possible?

When protons deviate from the right trajectory because they interact and repel in the "almost forward direction", they must be safely removed from the ring because they would pose a threat to the integrity of the collider.

There are 4,000 BLM (Beam Loss Monitoring) trash bins around the ring, equipped with detectors. And Orava and pals say that if a reaction$p+p\to p + p + X$ took place in a major detector, and the final two protons were going in the almost forward direction, they may still be measured in the BLM system, matched to the other partner that was thrown to another BLM trash bin, and a measurement of their outgoing energies is sufficient to tell us the information about the mass of $$X$$ – possibly the cernette (or other new particles) – without caring about the decay channel of $$X$$.

It sounds very exciting. If the idea is right and may be realized quickly in practice, we could have a discovery of a new particle of the same mass within a month or two.

If you know that this paper is rubbish and you can explain why, please do so quickly! ;-) In particular, I don't even understand why the cross section for the forward-produced cernette is supposed to be so much higher than the normal production already detected by ATLAS and CMS. Can you explain the enhancement to me?