The Large Hadron Collider restarted today (July 5) and is set to smash particles together at unprecedented energy levels.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. located at CERN The nearly 17-mile-long (27-kilometer) loop near Geneva, Switzerland, opened today after being offline for four years for improvements. Once those adjustments are complete, scientists want to use the giant accelerator to smash protons together at record-breaking energies of up to 13.6 trillion electron volts (TeV) — an energy level that should make it more likely that the accelerator will produce particles not yet observed by science. .
Improvements to the accelerator’s particle beams did more than increase their energy range; the increased compaction level will denser the beams with particles, increasing the probability of collisions so much that the accelerator is expected to capture more particle interactions in the third run than the previous two combined. During the two previous periods from 2009 to 2013 and from 2015 to 2018, atom Smasher has advanced physicists’ understanding of how the basic building blocks of matter interact—he called Standard Model – and led to the long-awaited discovery Higgs bosonthe elusive particle that gives all matter its mass.
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But despite the accelerator’s experiments, which have produced 3,000 scientific papers with many small discoveries and tantalizing hints of deeper physics, scientists have yet to find definitive evidence of new particles or entirely new physics. They hope that will change after this upgrade.
“We will measure the strengths of the Higgs boson’s interaction with matter and particles to unprecedented precision and continue our search for the decay of the Higgs boson. dark matter particles and the search for additional Higgs bosons,” LHC spokesman Andreas Hoecker ATLAS collaborationan international project involving physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff, statement (opens in new tab).
Inside the LHC’s 17-mile-long underground ring, protons spin at near the speed of light before slamming into each other. The result? New and sometimes exotic particles are formed. The faster these protons travel, the more energy they have. And the more energy they have, the bigger the particles they can produce by smashing them together. Because heavier particles are generally short-lived and immediately decay into lighter particles, atom smashers like the LHC detect possible new particles by looking for decay products.
One of the goals of the LHC is to further explore the Standard Model, the mathematical framework physicists use to describe all known fundamental particles. universe and the forces they interact with. Although the model has been around in its final form since the mid-1970s, physicists are not very happy with it and are constantly looking for new ways to test it and, if they’re lucky, discover new physics that will make it fail.
This is because the model, despite being the most comprehensive and accurate so far, has huge gaps and is completely incapable of explaining where its strength lies. weight what dark matter is made of or why there is more matter antimatter in the universe.
While physicists want to use the improved accelerator to probe the rules of the Standard Model and learn more about the Higgs boson, upgrades to the LHC’s four main detectors put it in a good position to search for physics beyond what is already known. The LHC’s main detectors – ATLAS and CMS – have been upgraded to collect more than twice as much data as they did before in their new task of searching for particles that can sustain two collisions; and the LHCb detector, now gathering 10 times more data than before, will look for breaks in the fundamental symmetries of the universe and explain why the cosmos has more matter than antimatter.
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At the same time, the ALICE detector will be launched to study high-energy ion collisions, which will increase the number recorded by a factor of 50 compared to previous runs. After disintegrating, the ions—atomic nuclei that have been given an electrical charge by removing electrons from their orbital shells—form a primordial subatomic soup called a quark-gluon plasma. Big bang.
In addition to these research efforts, a number of small groups will explore the roots of other physics mysteries with experiments that will study the inside of protons; examine his behavior cosmic rays; and search for the long-theorized magnetic monopole, a hypothetical particle that is an isolated magnet with only one magnetic pole. Added to these are two new experiments, FASER (Forward Search Experiment) and SND (Scattering and Neutrino Detector), made possible by the installation of two new detectors during the recent shutdown of the accelerator. FASER will scan extremely light and weakly interacting particles such as neutrinos and dark matter, while SND will only neutrinosimaginary particles that can pass through without interacting with much matter.
A long-sought axion by particle physicists is a strange hypothetical particle that neither emits, absorbs, nor reflects light, and is a prime suspect in what constitutes dark matter.
This third run of the LHC is scheduled to last four years. After this period, the collisions will be suspended once again for new upgrades that will take the LHC to even greater power levels. Once upgraded and restarted in 2029, the High Luminosity LHC is expected to capture 10 times more data than the previous three launches.
Originally published in Live Science.
