The Large Hadron Collider restarts today (July 5) and is designed to crush particles together at unprecedented energy rates.
It Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Located in CERN Near Geneva, Switzerland, the 17-mile (27-kilometer) track is up and running today after spending four years offline making upgrades. With those improvements complete, scientists want to use giant accelerators to co-crush protons with record energies of up to 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV) — energy levels that should increase the likelihood of accelerator-generating particles yet to be observed by science. .
Improved particle beam accelerators have increased their power range; Increasing the compression rate, making the block denser with particles, would increase the probability of a collision such that the accelerator is expected to pick up more particle interactions in the third spin than was the case in the previous two experiments combined. During the previous two periods, from 2009 to 2013 and 2015 to 2018, Corn Smasher has improved physicists’ understanding of how the building blocks of matter interact – called Standard shape It leads to the long awaited discovery Higgs bosonThe elusive particle that gives all matter its mass.
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However, despite the accelerator experiments, which have produced 3,000 scientific papers on many small discoveries and interesting clues to deeper physics, scientists have yet to find conclusive evidence of a new particle or an entirely new physics. After this upgrade, they hoped that would change.
“We will measure the strength of the interaction of the Higgs boson with matter and force the particles to unprecedented precision, and we will continue our search for the decay of the Higgs boson. dark matter In addition to looking for additional Higgs bosons,” Andreas Hooker, spokesman for the Large Hadron Collider cooperation atlasan international project involving physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff, he said in a statement (Opens in a new tab).
Inside the LHC’s 17-mile underground loop, protons travel at almost the speed of light before they collide with each other. Results? New and sometimes strange particles are formed. The faster the proton goes, the higher its energy. The higher the energy, the greater the molecular mass you can generate by crushing them together. Atomic breakers such as the LHC detect potential new particles by looking for signs of decay products, because heavier particles are usually short-lived and decay immediately into lighter particles.
One of the goals of the LHC is to further research the Standard Model, the mathematical framework physicists use to describe all the known elementary particles in the world. Universe and the forces with which they interact. Even though the model has existed in its final form since the mid-1970s, physicists are far from satisfied and are constantly looking for new ways to test it and, if lucky, discover new physics that will fail.
This is because the model, although the most comprehensive and accurate to date, has such a large gap that it simply cannot explain where the model’s strengths lie. gravity Who, what is dark matter made of, or why is there more matter than Antimaterals in the universe.
While physicists want to use the upgraded accelerator to check the rules of the Standard Model and learn more about the Higgs boson, upgrading to the LHC’s four main detectors also puts it in a good position to explore physics beyond what is already known. The LHC’s main detectors – ATLAS and CMS – have been upgraded to collect more than twice the data they previously did in their new mission to search for particles that can survive two collisions; And the LHCb detector, which is now gathering 10 times more data than ever before, will look for breaks in the basic symmetry of the universe and for explanations for why the universe contains more matter than antimatter.
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Meanwhile, the ALICE detector will be run to study high-energy ion collisions, which will be a 50-fold increase compared to the previous process. When the ions smash together, the ions – atomic nuclei that give off an electric charge by removing electrons from their orbital shells – produce a primordial subatomic soup called quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that only exists for the first microseconds afterward. big explosion.
In addition to this research effort, a smaller group of groups will investigate other roots of physical mysteries through experiments that will study the interior of the proton. behavioral investigation cosmic rays; And the long search for theoretical magnetic monopoles, hypothetical particles that are isolated magnets with only one magnetic pole. In addition there are two new experiments, called FASER (Advanced Search Experiment) and SND (Scattering and Neutrino Detector), which are made possible by the installation of two new detectors when the accelerator is recently turned off. FASER will search for very light and weakly interacting particles, such as neutrinos and dark matter, and SND will search exclusively for neutrinoghost particles that can travel through most matter without interacting with it.
One particle physicists are excited to look for is the long-awaited axon, a strange hypothetical particle that doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, and is a prime suspect in what dark matter is made of.
The third round of the LHC is scheduled to last for four years. After that time, the collision will be stopped again for further upgrades that will propel the Collider to a greater level of power. Once upgraded and operational again in 2029, the LHC’s high-luminosity mash is expected to capture 10 times the data from the previous three cycles combined.
Originally published in Live Science.
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