Chapter 10
The Future of Particle Physics: The LHC
and Beyond
Ken Peach
10.1 2017 Update
I have been asked to submit a revised version of this chapter, published almost a
decade ago. However, I think that it is better to leave the historical record as it
was—this was an article written in its time and for its time. If I was writing this
article today, I would call it “The Future of Particle Physics—Beyond the LHC”,
in recognition of the fact that, when originally written, the LHC was still under
construction and now it has been operating for several years. The other key event
which informed the original article was the recently-developed European Strategy
for Particle Physics, adopted by the CERN Council in July 2006; the strategy was
updated in 2013 and formally adopted in May of that year [1]; as I write, the process
of updating the strategy is under way.
The intervening decade has seen significant progress, most spectacularly in the
observation of the Higgs scalar [3] at 125.10 ± 0.14 GeV/c 2 [2] which completes
the Standard Model of the particles and their interactions (excluding gravity) which
dominate the local region of the universe. This means that all of the free parameters
of the Standard Model are now known with reasonable precision, which can be
chosen as (see Table 10.1):
1. The quark masses (m u, m d), ( m c, m s), ( m t, m b) ;
2. the charged lepton masses m e, m μ, m τ ;
3. the Z 0 mass M Z ;
4. the Higgs Mass M H ;
5. the electromagnetic coupling constant α;
6. the strong coupling constant α s (M Z );
K. Peach ()
John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, Oxford, UK
e-mail: ken.peach@adams-institute.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020
H. Schopper (ed.), Particle Physics Reference Library,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38207-0_10
625
The Future of Particle Physics: The LHC
and Beyond
Ken Peach
10.1 2017 Update
I have been asked to submit a revised version of this chapter, published almost a
decade ago. However, I think that it is better to leave the historical record as it
was—this was an article written in its time and for its time. If I was writing this
article today, I would call it “The Future of Particle Physics—Beyond the LHC”,
in recognition of the fact that, when originally written, the LHC was still under
construction and now it has been operating for several years. The other key event
which informed the original article was the recently-developed European Strategy
for Particle Physics, adopted by the CERN Council in July 2006; the strategy was
updated in 2013 and formally adopted in May of that year [1]; as I write, the process
of updating the strategy is under way.
The intervening decade has seen significant progress, most spectacularly in the
observation of the Higgs scalar [3] at 125.10 ± 0.14 GeV/c 2 [2] which completes
the Standard Model of the particles and their interactions (excluding gravity) which
dominate the local region of the universe. This means that all of the free parameters
of the Standard Model are now known with reasonable precision, which can be
chosen as (see Table 10.1):
1. The quark masses (m u, m d), ( m c, m s), ( m t, m b) ;
2. the charged lepton masses m e, m μ, m τ ;
3. the Z 0 mass M Z ;
4. the Higgs Mass M H ;
5. the electromagnetic coupling constant α;
6. the strong coupling constant α s (M Z );
K. Peach ()
John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, Oxford, UK
e-mail: ken.peach@adams-institute.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020
H. Schopper (ed.), Particle Physics Reference Library,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38207-0_10
625