Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding?

Re:Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding? by jessriedel on Monday July 25, 2011 @02:18PM (#2803840)

Why does their detectability depend on the mass? My understanding is that both the standard and Randall-Sundrum gravitons can only be identified through missing energy; neither are possible to directly detect through any feasible experiment. Does the low upper bound on the mass constrain the cross-section?

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Re:Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding? by kamagmar on Monday July 25, 2011 @03:46PM (#2804281)

I believe the main RS discovery channel is looking for a p pbar -> graviton -> e+ e- resonance, where p is a parton (i.e., quark or gluon).

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Re:Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding? by jessriedel on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @10:14AM (#2807384)

Is the following reasoning correct? If the standard graviton is massless, it can't decay into r rbar for any particle r (because of momentum conservation). The standard graviton could have a tiny mass, but the low upper bounds on it means that the cross section is too tiny to be observed. RS gets around this because at LHC energies the RS graviton has a larger high-energy effective mass (because of extra dimesions) while still satisfying the low-energy experimental mass limits.

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