Making the exotic commonplace

The Large Hadron Collider will provide physicists with their first opportunity to study the debris from very high energy subatomic collisions – seven times more powerful than any they have studied before. But even at those energies some of the really exotic particles will be created only rarely, and finding them will be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Upgrading the LHC will increase by ten the number of particle collisions seen at the LHC each hour, and that will give physicists a greater chance of seeing even the most elusive particles.

The Super-LHC (SLHC) will be the main scientific tool for a large particle physics community comprising more than 5000 physicists from over 350 institutes worldwide. The unique world-class facility will outrate all other facilities available to physicists exploring subatomic particles at high-energies.

A simulation shows how the famous Higgs particle might appear as it decays in the CMS detector (original image here).