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There is every indication that the next decade will also see great progress in fundamental physics. 2008 will be the year of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), when the most powerful particle accelerator ever built starts to collect data at an energy around 1 TeV. By Einstein’s famed equation E = mc2, this corresponds to a mass one million times heavier than an electron, an experimental tour de force that will expand our reach into the energy frontier. Moreover, the Standard Model of particle physics — which represents the combined experimental and theoretical knowledge of the past 100 years — ceases to make substantive predictions at energies in excess of 1 TeV, so we are guaranteed to see new phenomena at the LHC.
Still, there are reasons to believe that LHC physics will be particularly difficult to decipher. Historically, small anomalies in experimental data have pointed the way to new theories, but ever since the W and Z bosons were discovered in 1983, precision tests of the Standard Model have shown no statistically significant deviations. Indeed, the absence of anomalies has ruled out broad classes of elegant TeV scale proposals, and while new models have been put forth in the past five years that do evade current experimental limits, no one model is any more compelling than another.
If the only problem were that no front-runner has emerged among the many LHC models, we would simply wait for the LHC to turn on and verify the correct extension of the Standard Model. However, we have learned that models which come from completely different theoretical starting points and which are in principle distinguishable at future colliders often yield very similar signatures at the LHC. Therefore, in the theoretical particle physics community, we are faced with two tasks before the first round of LHC data is released in three years. First, we must explore as many scenarios for TeV scale physics as possible, with particular emphasis on models whose LHC signatures mimic other well-established models. Second, we need to develop a general strategy to go from LHC data to the correct model of TeV scale physics.
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