RE: A crash course on particle physics (towards our steemSTEM meetup at CERN) - 5 - The challenges of the searches for new phenomena
Today, we are February 8. I just finished with my last student of the day, and I feel I should be in Geneve tonight enjoying a fresh beer with SteemStem!
I will be thinking about our community tomorrow during your adventure inside the CMS. If you can, please forward to the members present tomorrow my warm regards!
Back to our discussion:
Thank you for the explanation. And what about the unexpected... If the selection is based on triggers... might we not miss something highly unusual (not expected, thus not programmed to trigger a recording)?
Or maybe, there is an algorithm that also filters out all that is expected, leaving only the interesting reactions.
What I mean is that you appear to extract the interesting collisions, instead of filtering out the standard ones. filtering out the standard ones would allow to detect something beyond the standard model if ever it happens. Is this being done? or is it just unrealistic in terms of computational power?
A significant fraction of recorded events is randomly recorded. That allows for the unexpected to happen :)
Aaah, that's good then... sometimes looking too closely at something, one misses what is going on the side. But of course, LHC scientists know that!
Yep, they know. We really want to be ready for anything ^^