Two beams of protons were compressed around the Large Hadron Collider on Friday, indicating a return from the world’s largest particle accelerator after more than three years of hiatus. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has spent the past three years doing maintenance work and make major upgrades to the system. Now, the group is preparing to begin collecting four years of data that scientists hope will reveal new secrets of the universe.
“It will be two to three times better, in terms of our experiment’s ability to detect, collect and analyze data,” Marcella Bona, a particle physicist from Queen Mary University of London, told BBC.
This summer will mark the start of the third round of the LHC, referred to as Run 3. The upgrades over the past few years mean that this run will see greater numbers of particle collisions, and that these particles will collide with greater energy than anything seen in previous cycles. Scientists will use the new capabilities to test the limits of the Standard Model of physics, a theory that explains how particles interact at the subatomic level. Along with other experiments, they will try to find new types of particles, and perhaps even get a clearer picture of dark matter, a substance that has yet to be discovered that scientists believe accounts for a large proportion. Universe. But its existence has not yet been proven.
The new projects will also examine the Higgs boson, a particle discovered through experiments at the LHC in a landmark discovery ten years ago, in more detail.
“It’s a really exciting time,” Bona said. BBC. “For the past three years we have been working on modernizing the machines. Now we are ready.”
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