With the discovery of the Higgs boson our picture of the subatomic world--the Standard Model--is complete. But looking at the Universe on a larger scale, there are things the Standard Model cannot explain, including gravity, dark matter and several others. The Standard Model must be just part of a larger picture, and one of the most obvious places to look for evidence of this larger picture is the biggest experiment studying the subatomic world: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The first part of this book describes an example of how the experiments at the LHC search for new particles. I'll be focusing here on the two 'general purpose' experiments: ATLAS (of which I am a member) and CMS. Searches remain central to the work of these two experiments, but the data so far have not revealed any surprises and there is increased interest in making sure we haven't missed something along the way: new discoveries may lie in unconventional signatures, or perhaps we simply haven't had the right idea yet. The rest of book will focus on what some of these unconventional signatures are, and how we are making our ongoing measurements and searches 'future-proof'--i.e., being able to use measurements we make today to test any new ideas that are developed in the future. The rest of book will focus on these two areas.
Includes bibliographical references (page 17).