Inside the hunt for new physics at the world’s largest particle collider
MIT Technology Review

Researchers involved in particle physics are finding ingenious ways to overcome the limiting factors that influence their work. Despite the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generating a petabyte of collision data every second it operates, less than 1% of that data is saved. It currently remains physically impossible to collect such volumes of data.

This is before the LHC’s ‘high luminosity’ upgrade which will enable it to record 10 times the amount of data that has previously been accumulated. In relation to the mathematical approaches being taken to capture and observe that data, ‘there’s a lot of room for creativity and exploration, and really just kind of thinking very broadly.’ At the same time consensus is needed in the theoretical approach, the model to be explored; ‘if you don’t have a particular model in mind, you’re not doing physics.’

Great minds are being tasked with overcoming the limitations around which models and methods of searching and analysing the data are pursued, whilst others are having to undertake the enormous physical and political feats of engineering required to reach the next level in the scale of the particle collisions taking place. For ‘every time we’ve gone to higher energy, we’ve discovered some new layer of nature.’