The Large Hadron Collider has become that much mightier and it was restarted after two years break on Sunday. The Large Hadron Collider was switched off for maintenance and a major upgrade. Scientists hope to create Dark Energy and also possibly prove that Big Bang has not happened.
When the LHC works to its full capacity its collision energy will be 13 TeV (Tera Electron-Volts), which is about 65% more than its previous 8 TeV.
Researchers have switched the Large Hadron Collider after a brief hiccup and hope to start treading uncharted frontiers in particle physics.
Rolf Heuer, the director general of Europe’s CERN particle physics center, said Sunday in a statement, “Beam went smoothly through the whole machine. It’s fantastic to see it going so well after two years and such a major overhaul of the LHC.”
The LHC is one of the most powerful collider and it is also one of the most expensive. It is estimated to cost almost $10 Billion and its experimental team is composed of thousands of Engineers and physicists. The LHC control team is planning to send waves of protons in both directions around the 27 kilometer ring.
The researchers plan to smash the proton beams together and the LHC detectors will find the new particles which will be formed in this collision.
The collider was first run between2009 and 2013. The collider was used to detect a subatomic particle, Higgs boson. Existence of Higgs Boson was predicted way back in the 60’s but could not be detected till the arrival of LHC. Higgs was the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle known as the standard model, the theory which governs the particle physics.
The LHC accelerates the protons to incredible speeds almost reaching the speed of light. The protons are accelerated using a ring of powerful magnets which has been cooled to absolute Zero. The interconnection between the magnets has been upgraded to handle increased power.
In the first innings, the LHC’s collisions hit a top energy of 8 trillion electron volts, or 8 TeV. Researchers plan to raise it to 13 TeV, close to the machine’s maximum design level.
Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Illinois said, “The only question in everybody’s mind is, ‘Can you crank it up to higher energies?’ … That’s the biggest jump in energy we’re going to have during my lifetime.”
The LHC would open the doors to new frontiers in particle physics — a new and extra dimensions of space, a new fundamental forces of nature, the constituents of dark matter, or a whole new particle which has never been discovered.
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