Chapter I - Thomas

Thomas is tired. He hasn’t got a single solid sleep in the last three weeks. It’s not fear or or anger that kept him from sleeping. It’s excitement. He is finally doing what he was trained for all these years.

When he got an offer for a PHD position at the LHC experiment he thought it was just another, boring data project. This is what most theoretical phycisists do that work at the big particle collider in Geneva. The LHC smashes protons on protons. The various particles inside the proton, mostly quarks, interact. After the collision various particles are detected in the detector. This way the several LHC detectors collect loads of data and someone needs to look into it.

So far, nothing exciting was found except for the Higgs particle. Unfortunately the discovery of the Higgs particle doesn’t help us to understand the universe any better. It’s existence was accepted by almost every phycisist centuries before its discovery. If the LHC wouldn’t have found Higgs particle, that would be big news. But there was no new fundamental particle. No new interaction. Thousands of highly trained young and old phycisists spend years of their life searching. Searching for something that wasn’t there. Enthusiasm became disappointment quickly.

The LHC took 30 years to build. Thousands of students from all over the world spent their best years working on it. There were thousands of small and big problems that needed to be solved before protons could be smashed on protons with unmatched energy.

Several fellow students of Thomas decided to earn their PHD by testing new silicon plates for another LHC detector update. These silicon plates are just one small puzzle piece in the huge detectors. Still, someone needs to test them for years before they can be used in high-precision measurements.

The chances to discover something interesting in the data was much lower 12 years after the LHC started taking measurements. But it wasn’t zero. 12 years of measurements, 12 years of data analysis yielded no new results. But with more data comes better statistics. Something small can become big over the years. A small unexplained bump in the data can become a major discovery over the years. That was what everyone still working on the LHC was hoping for.

Lacking a better offer he took the the data PHD offer and he was right. It was boring.

After the LHC started taking measurements almost everyone was looking for Supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is a theory that solves one of the biggest problems of the standard model. To solve this particular problem Supersymmetry predicts the existence of many new particles which sould be visible at the LHC. There was no sign of these new particles and thus Supersymmetry lost most of its appeal.

This was a desaster for a complete generation of theoretical phycisist. Thousands spent their entire career exploring Supersymmetry. A typical student project was to compute one of the various interactions of a new Supersymmetry particle with a standard particle. Such computations sometimes took years to finish, but were nessecary if one wants to find signs of Supersymmetry in the LHC data. The motivation was to be the first who computed something new that was actually found at the LHC.

To summarize: Supersymmetry was everyones darling before the first conclusive LHC results. Now it’s dead.

This desaster was a relief for all data guys working on LHC measurements. Now they were free to search for whatever they liked. There was no longer one big thing everyone was doing, but many small projects.

The group Thomas joined at the LHC experiment searched for signs of grand unification. Grand Unified Theories are speculative theories where all forces become one at high energies. Also all particles become part of one big thing at high energies instead of the several scattered pieces we see at low energies. This is beautiful idea.

Unfortunately Grand Unified Theories lost their appeal already several centuries ago. The first Grand Unified Theories predicted that protons decay. No experiment ever observed a proton decay despite massive efforts. Thus Grand Unified Theories were abandoned by most theoretical phycisists. Still some more complicated Grand Unified Theories are able to explain why no proton decay was ever observed. The members of the GUT group at the LHC share the opinion that Grand Unified Theories are too beautiful to be wrong.

Why should there be three forces? Why are there all these fundamental particles that we observe in the colliders? Grand Unified Theories answer these questions beautifully. This was enough motiviation, despite fourty years of searching before them found nothing.

The first two years of Thomas’PHD were slow. The only thing he presented at conferences were null-results. Theories they could rule out through their analysis. Nothing exciting.

Then one Monday morning he saw something. Something he had almost stopped hoping for. He wasn’t sure. He wanted to be sure before telling his supervisor. After two weeks of careful analysis he was ready to tell the others in the group about his discovery. The rumours about something big started spreading across CERN. Across the various physics blogs. Across Twitter.

Then the power went out.