After a technical break for maintenance and modernization. Roberto Tenchini (Infn): “An exciting four-year period has begun for particle physics”
After a pause of more than three years for maintenance and modernization, the Lhc accelerator was reactivated at CERN in Geneva. The two beams of protons that rotate in the opposite direction to each other in the 27 kilometers of the ring of the Large Hadron Collider have started to circulate at low energy. After a running-in period that could last until June-July, the accelerator will then be able to return to full activity with the increase in the intensity of the beams and their energy until reaching the steady-state energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts (13.6 TeV), a higher energy than that achieved in the previous phases.
New achievements
“A four-year period is opening that promises to be exciting for particle physics,” commented Roberto Tenchini, president of the National Scientific Commission for Particle Physics of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn). «The accelerator should make the data on the anomalies observed in the decays of the b quark much more solid, excluding them or confirming them definitively». “These first particle beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after the great work that was done during the long hiatus,” added Rhodri Jones, head of the particle beam operations. “Thanks to the work carried out in this break, now the LHC will be able to work at higher energies” and “make available a significant increase in data,” said Mike Lamont, director of accelerators and technology at CERN.
April 22, 2022 (change April 22, 2022 | 14:12)
© Time.News