First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)

[Alex K]

I am mainly posting here to have this thread show up in "my post's"

Alex, if you would be so kind, would you tell us the results of all the experiments being conducted (suitable for a dummy like me)? 

Ok

But you have to be aware that it's not discrete experiments being conducted at certain points in time - we'll have 40 million collisions per second, day in and day out, and the data from all the potentially interesting collisions (still many thousands per second) are collected in a big database. At regular intervals, experimentalists will prepare a search analysis and "unblind" the current data taken up to that point - it is always an incremental progress. If something should really stick out in the data like a sore thumb from the beginning, it will be announced after the analysis has been done, but who knows whether that is going to happen and when. Apart from sensational discoveries, what will happen is that more and more statistics are piled onto existing data to obtain more and more precise measurements of known things such as the masses of the Higgs and top quark. Whenever an interesting analysis comes out, I can mention it.