The Large Hadron Collider restarted Friday after a three-year break for upgrades that will allow protons to break together at even greater speeds, in the hopes of new ground discoveries.
It will be studied further Higgs bosonWhose existence was proved in 2012, and put the Standard Model of particle physics to the test after recent anomalies gave rise to theories about nature’s mysterious fifth force.
“Two beams of protons circled in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring” after noon Friday, Europe’s Physics Laboratory CERN said in a statement.
Buried more than 100 meters (330 ft) below the border between Switzerland and France, the collider has been shut down for maintenance and upgrades since December 2018, the second longest shutdown in its 14-year history.
,
A” with a relatively small number of p to begin with, the collider is taking it easyCERN stated that the rotans were “operated at an energy of 450 billion electronvolts”.
“High-intensity, high-energy collisions are a few months away,” said Rodri Jones, head of CERN’s beam department.
CERN said its experts will “work round the clock” to prepare the collider to set a new record of 13.6 trillion electronvolts.
The unprecedented number of upcoming collisions will also serve as the starting gun for four years of large-scale data collection and analysis by CERN’s four giant particle detectors.
‘Exciting few years’
The Large Hadron Collider’s observations of the Higgs boson were seen as further validation of the Standard Model, which scientists have the best theory for the most basic building blocks of the universe and what forces rule them.
But the collider’s new phase of exploration comes at an interesting time, in which the Standard Model comes under pressure from a series of measurements that do not seem to fit within its framework.
Earlier this month more than 400 scientists said after a decade of measurements they found the mass of the W boson is much greater than the Standard Model.
Harry Cliffe, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, said the collider’s upgrade means “it’s going to be an exciting few years”.
Cliff studied particles called beauty quarks at the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) and said they “do not behave as we would expect” under the Standard Model.
“All these discrepancies can be explained by a new force,” Cliffe told AFP.
There are currently four known fundamental forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces – and a fifth would be “a really big deal.”
Another explanation could be that we know less than we think.
It could be that “we’re really looking at one corner of the picture, and a much bigger picture where the Standard Model matters a lot,” Cliff said.
Either way, it will be “a step on a road to a more integrated understanding of the basic ingredients of the universe,” he said.
The biggest hole in the Standard Model is that it fails to account for dark matter, which is believed to be a significant part of the universe.
So far, the Large Hadron Collider has not found any signs of dark matter.
“It’s hard to detect by its nature,” Cliff said.
But he added that “it will be a great breakthrough, if we find a particle of dark matter”.