system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When the LHC first started the beams had 3.5TeV per beam but the heaviest particle discovered is 173GeV. Since they're upgrading, does that mean no new particles have been found between 173GeV and 7TeV?
gpt
1. It's a bit more complex than that. Even though energy of the center of collision is X it does not mean you will produce a single particle with such energy (assuming such particle exists). Normally lots of particles are produced. Higher energy means you cover broader energy range, and you raise probability of getting some very high energy particles. New particle discovery is purely `statistical` - if we notice enough signals from some particular energy range, we can assume there is a particle there. But probability of producing such particle might be very small, so it requires lots of data to confirm. Maybe there is a particle at 7TeV but the chance of all collision energy going into this single particle is so low, that it didn't give significant enough signal.
2. Current LHC upgrade moves towards `higher luminosity` and not `higher collision energy`. This means LHC will have more collisions, over the same energy range.