Can anyone tell me if there are any practical applications for this, or it is 'just' a further understanding of the world around us (albeit an important one)?
Thanks for saying that. People must have misunderstood my question. I was genuinely interested to know what kind of practical applications these kind of particle discoveries give us.
I don't think people misunderstood your question. Whether you intended it that way or not, asking if a scientific discovery has a practical application is a loaded question that gets asked every time something is discovered in physics. Sometimes it is used to undermine the money being poured into scientific research, other times just to belittle the discovery.
The reality is that these discoveries are important in themselves for furthering science. The applications come at a later point when the engineers need something with these new cool properties.
When someone explicitly goes out of their way to disclaim the sort of problems you describe, it makes no sense to criticize them for it anyway. The question itself is totally reasonable, and if it's often misused, well, they were clearly aware of that and intentionally avoided it.
When people go around talking about "new physics", translate it into "we know absolutely nothing about this (isn't that great?)", practical applications included.
The discoveries in the 20's that were "'just' a further understanding of the world around us" are what give us computers now. Not something someone could have predicted back then. Give it time.
Most of these particles are short lived and pretty useless in themselves. However, their discovery led to a theory around them, and that theory might be useful for things like quantum computation. Or not. Hard to predict.
Would you settle for from the 1950s? Neutrinos were first proven to exist then (though they were theorized from the 1930s). Those have been used to "look inside" the ruined Fukushima reactor.
Sometimes the process is more important than the result. For instance, the reason we have a World Wide Web is because hundreds of people working at CERN on projects like the LHC needed a better way to organize and share documentation. Even if the LHC's results lead directly to a fusion reactor or a warp drive, it will still be debatable whether that's more important -- or more economically valuable -- than what their researchers have already given us.
Very exciting then, fifty years and we could be unlocking some serious building blocks :) It's a blink of an eye when you look at the speed of scientific progress over 2000 years !
If it's a graviton/gravitino then it could lead to things like mass drives way down the road - but until we know what it is, it's way to early to even be considering practical applications. Oh, and if it is a gravity mediating particle then we may also be able to solve that pesky dark matter question.
Particle acceleration as a technology has some applications/ From the top of my head: Synchrotron radiation is used for material testing, in semiconductor fabrication its is used to implant ions, there are applications to cancer treatment. The technology that gets developed to actually carry out the experiment helps to train generations of high tech workers (think radiation hardened semiconductor circuits for example, specifically in the detectors) and develop advanced fabrication methods (needed to build the superconducting magnets for example). From a policy perspective, the fact that it also advances the borders of human understanding is just a nice side effect.
