LHC to soon search for new sub-atomic particles, says physicist

London, May 18 (ANI): The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could start its search for new sub-atomic particles, says a leading physicist.

By the end of summer, the LHC could become sensitive enough to probe a hitherto unexplored domain in particle physics, if commissioning work goes well.

And the first candidates for discovery are two boson particles that have been predicted to exist, reports The BBC.

The 6bn pound collider is being used to smash together proton beams to shed light on the nature of Universe.

The machine has seen half a billion of these collisions since beams crossed for the first time in November 2009.

LHC is designed to search for the elusive Higgs boson and study new physics predicted to exist at the 1,000 gigaelectronvolt (GeV) scale (approximately 1,000 times larger than the mass of a proton).

One of the first prospects for new discoveries at this mass scale are particles known as W prime and Z prime bosons.

These are heavier versions of the W and Z bosons, which are responsible for weak interactions.

If all goes well, the machine could be sensitive enough to probe the 1,000 GeV scale within a few months, according to Dr Tony Weidberg, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Weidberg works on the LHC's Atlas experiment, which is one of two enormous "multi-purpose" detectors looking for new phenomena in the particle collisions (the other is the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS).

Atlas has already identified what appear to be lower-mass W bosons from their "decay products" in collisions at the LHC.

Although the W boson was already known to physicists, identifying known particles is vital for calibration of the detectors like Atlas.

The discovery of higher-mass W and Z bosons would shed important new light on these interactions. (ANI)