ars technica | Science News | 28 July 2010
If energy issues seem to be attracting the attention of a lot of physicists, the Large Hadron Collider seems to be drawing the attention of many of the rest of them, including people in fields like cosmology, which deals with items on the opposite end of the size scale. In turn, the people working on the LHC and other particle detectors are carefully paying attention to the latest astronomy results, hoping they'll put limits on the properties and identities of the zoo of theoretical particles that need to be considered.
There are two reasons for this newfound unity in physics. If cosmology has become a part of elementary particle physics, as Nobel Laureate George Smoot put it at the Lindau Meeting, it's because we've found that "it's a continuum from quantum mechanics to clumps of matter to galaxies." The properties of the tiniest particles should dictate what the Universe looks like, but all the cosmological data is telling us there must be something in addition to what we know about, dark matter particles that we haven't yet identified.
The second issue is that we know the Standard Model, which describes the properties of these particles, is wrong, but we're not sure what to replace it with yet, and it's entirely possible that astronomy and cosmology will provide key insights into this process.
The Lindau meeting featured an all-star panel that ran through some of the evidence that we could be on the verge of finding something big, in a discussion entitled "Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the LHC." Smoot and his co-laureate John Mather, who won for the Cosmic Background Explorer, were joined by physicists David Gross, Carlo Rubbia, Gerard t'Hooft, and Martinus Veltman.
