Scientists Make New Discovery

Scientists Use Public LHC Data to Make New Discovery

Releasing the results of experiments like the Large Hadron Collider could speed up the pace of scientific discovery.

CERN
 
By Avery Thompson

Back in 2014, CERN—the scientific agency that runs the Large Hadron Collider, among other things—did something unprecedented. Sure, it found the Higgs boson in 2012, but this was potentially much bigger. In 2014, CERN released its raw scientific data to the public, and the first group of scientists has analyzed that data to find something new.

In 2014, CERN created the Open Data portal, which made all data collected by the LHC available for scientists around the world to use. No particle collider has ever done this before, and the precedent it sets could mean more and better results from accelerators around the world.

In this instance, a group of researchers analyzed data from the 2014 run of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the LHC's primary detectors. Using that data, they made a discovery that the LHC scientists missed. Examining certain particle collisions, they proved that the equations that predicted the energy of those collisions could also predict the pattern of certain particle jets that are emitted during those same collisions.

While this research is important, and confirms hypotheses that physicists have held for a while, what's more important is that new research was published using old LHC data that had been publicly released. If CERN never released this data, who knows how long it would have taken for someone else to publish this same finidng.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next few years, more and better LHC data will be released, and more people will start using it to make scientific discoveries. This means more published research, which can only be a good thing.

It might also mean more particle accelerators will follow CERN's lead and release their own data publicly. If this does happen, the end result will be an acceleration of scientific research surrounding particle physics. Thanks to CERN, sharing scientific data will hopefully become the new normal, rather than a strange exception.

Source: MIT