As of Tuesday, it will run 24 hours a day for nearly four years with a record power of 13.6 trillion electron volts.
Ten years after one of the greatest milestones in the history of science, the discovery of the “God particle”, the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider it is about to extend the limits of the known once again.
The “machine of God” will start colliding with the protons unprecedented energy levels in his quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.
The largest and most powerful particle collider in the world resumed operation in April after a three-year hiatus for updates in preparation for its third run.
Starting Tuesday, it will work 24 hours a day for nearly four years with a record energy of 13.6 trillion electron voltsas announced by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
The process is as follows: two beams of protons (particles in the nucleus of an atom) are sent in opposite directions almost at the speed of light around a 27 kilometer ring buried 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss border.
As of Tuesday, it will run 24 hours a day for nearly four years with a record power of 13.6 trillion electron volts.
The resulting collisions will be recorded and analyzed by thousands of scientists as part of a series of experiments, including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb, which will use the enhanced power to study the dark matter the dark energy and other fundamental mysteries.
1.6 billion collisions per second
“Our goal is make 1.6 billion collisions proton-proton per second “for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, said Mike Lamont, chief technology officer and accelerator at CERN.
“This time, the proton beams will be reduced less than 10 microns (a human hair is about 70 microns thick) to increase the collision rate, “he added.
The new rate of energy will allow scientists further investigate the Higgs bosonthat the Large Hadron Collider first observed on July 4, 2012.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (AFP)
that discovery revolutionized physics partly because the boson fits inside the Standard modelthe guiding theory of all the fundamental particles that make up matter and of the forces that govern them.
However, several recent discoveries have raised questions about the standard model and the recently updated collider will examine the Higgs boson in more depth.
“The Higgs boson is related to some of the the deepest open questions of physics essential “, said Fabiola Gianotti, Director General of CERN.
The discovery of the Higgs boson was one of the most important milestones in the history of science.
Compared to the first run of the collider that found the boson, this time it will be there 20 times more collisions. “This is a significant increase, paving the way for new discoveries,” Lamont said.
Joachim Mnich, director of research and computation at CERN, said that “there is still a lot to learn about the boson. The Higgs boson is really a fundamental particle or is a compound? “.
new season of physics
Previous experiments have determined the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as more than 60 composite particles required by the Standard ModelAs the tetraquark.
But Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theoretical physics department, said looking at the particles it’s just part of the job. “Particle physics doesn’t just want to understand how, our goal is to understand why,” he added.
Giant. The Hadron Collider has a 27 kilometer network of tunnels.
Between nine experiments from the Large Hadron Collider is ALICE, which investigates matter that existed in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, and LHCf, which uses collisions to simulate cosmic rays.
After this run, the collider will return in 2029 as a high brightness LHC, increasing the number of detectable events by a factor of 10.
Beyond that, scientists are planning a Circular collider of the futurea 100-kilometer loop that aims to reach energies of up to 100 trillion electron volts.
“A new season of physics begins“, CERN closed.
Source: ScienceAlert
Source: Clarin
