Scientists will record and analyze the data, which is expected to give rise to elements of “new physics” – or physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces. The LHC The Large Hadron Collider is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that are the smallest known building blocks of all things. Structurally, it is a 27 km loop of track buried 100 meters underground on the Swiss-French border. In its operational state, it fires two beams of protons at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions into a ring of superconducting electromagnets. The magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons in a tight beam and guides them along as they travel through beam tubes and eventually collide. “Just before the collision, another type of magnet is used to ‘squeeze’ the particles closer together to increase the chances of a collision. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is like shooting two needles 10 kilometers apart with such precision that they meet halfway,” according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (originally Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or CERN). in French), which operates the particle accelerator complex that houses the LHC. Since the LHC’s powerful electromagnets carry almost as much current as a lightning bolt, they must be kept cold. The LHC uses a liquid helium distribution system to keep its critical components extremely cold at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than interstellar space. Given these requirements, it is not easy to heat or cool the giant machine. Latest upgrade Three years after being shut down for maintenance and upgrades, the accelerator was reactivated in April. This is the LHC’s third operation, and from Tuesday it will operate around the clock for four years at unprecedented energy levels of 13 tera electron volts. (A TeV is 100 billion, or 10 to the power of 12, electron volts. An electron volt is the energy imparted to an electron by accelerating it through 1 volt of electric potential difference.) “We aim to deliver 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second” for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, CERN’s head of accelerators and technology Mike Lamont said, according to an AFP report. This time, the proton beams will be limited to less than 10 microns — a human hair is about 70 microns thick — to increase the collision rate, he said. (ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the LHC; the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, with the same goals as ATLAS but using a different magnet system design. ) Previous series and ‘God Particle’ discovery. Ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or “God particle” during the first test of the LHC. The discovery ended the decades-long search for the force-carrying subatomic particle and proved the existence of the Higgs mechanism, a theory formulated in the mid-1960s. This led to Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. The Higgs boson and its associated energy field are believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe. The second run of the LHC (Run 2) started in 2015 and lasted until 2018. The second season of data acquisition produced five times more data than Run 1. The third run will see 20 times more collisions compared to Run 1. “New Physics” After the discovery of the Higgs boson, scientists began using the data collected as a tool to look beyond the Standard Model, which is currently the best theory of the universe’s most elementary building blocks and their interactions . Scientists at CERN say they don’t know what Run 3 will reveal. The hope is to use the collisions to further our understanding of so-called “dark matter.” Newsletter | Click to get the best explanations of the day in your inbox This hard-to-detect particle is believed to make up most of the universe, but is completely invisible as it does not absorb, reflect or emit light. Luca Malgeri, a CERN scientist, told Reuters: “CERN scientists hope it could be detected, even fleetingly, in the debris of billions of collisions, just as the Higgs boson was.”
