Professors Ahlen, Lane, Shank and students discuss the LHC in The Daily Free Press

September 16, 2008

BU’s Daily Free Press of September 16 ran a story on the LHC. Professors Steve Ahlen, Ken Lane and Jim Shank and graduate students Jeremy Love and Nigel Nation discuss the LHC’s particle physics potential, its capacity to search for dark matter, and what it means to society in general. The LHC is bound to discover the mechanism underlying electroweak symmetry breaking. Several scenarios for this phenomenon have a particle which will serve as the elusive dark matter, and these particles may be produced and detected at the LHC. Many indirect spin-offs have been spawned by high-energy research — the World Wide Web to name one outstanding example — and the LHC era is likely to see more such boons to society. But one thing the LHC will not do, they stress, is produce a mini-black hole that grow to eat Geneva, Switzerland and the rest of the world.

The article may be read at the Free Press website.