The Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s particle accelerator, is back up and running after a three-year shutdown.
With this “machine” restart, physicists, despite many challenges posed by restarting a particle accelerator, are confident of bringing new discoveries, in particular about dark matter.
The Great Hadron Collider (LHC - Large Hadron Collider) was turned on again this Friday, with two beams of protons circulating in opposite directions on the 27-kilometre LHC ring, more than three years after being suspended for improvements and maintenance of the entire system.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN - has spent the last three years doing maintenance work and major upgrades to the system. Now, the group is predicting that the LHC will stay up and running for another four years to collect data that scientists hope will unlock new secrets of the universe.
It will be two to three times better in terms of the ability to detect, collect and analyze data
|referred Marcella Bona, a particle physicist at Queen Mary University of London to BBC.
This summer will mark the start of the LHC's third run, known as Run 3. Updates in recent years mean that this run will see a greater number of particle collisions and that these particles will collide with greater energy than anything seen in previous runs.
Scientists will use the new features to test the limits of The Standard Model, a theory that explains how particles interact at a subatomic level. In conjunction with other studies, they will try to find new types of particles and perhaps even get a clearer picture of dark matter, which scientists believe is responsible for a large part of the universe. Although its existence has not been proven.
-
