Rebooting the Large Hadron Collider to push physics to the edge

Scientists overseeing Earth’s largest particle accelerator turned it on for the first time in three years this weekend to solve some of the biggest mysteries in physics.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the powerful particle accelerator located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, restarted on Friday (April 22) after a three-year hiatus for maintenance and upgrades. Reactivation Launch what scientists call Run 3the third science course at the LHC, which will conduct experiments until 2024.

“Machinery and facilities underwent significant upgrades during the second extended shutdown of the CERN accelerator complex,” said Mike Lamont, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology. in the current situation Friday. “The LHC itself has undergone an extensive fusion program and will now operate at a higher power and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, will provide significantly more data for the upgraded LHC experiments.” These experiments will build on the discoveries of the LHC during its first run (2009-2013) and run 2 (2015-2018).

To reactivate it, the scientists fired the LHC’s 16.7-mile (27 kilometer) loop to inject two beams of protons in opposite directions at an energy level of 450 billion electronvolts. It’s just an appetizer to higher energy levels, the scientists said, as the LHC will run once it reaches its target of 13.6 trillion electronvolts in Race 3.

“These beams circulated at the injection energy and contained a relatively small number of protons,” Rodri Jones, CERN’s Head of Beams, said in the statement. The high-intensity, high-energy collisions are two months away.” But the first packets represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown.”

The LHC’s three-year shutdown allowed scientists to perform substantial upgrades to four major experiments on the particle accelerator. According to CERN, the ATLAS and CMS detectors alone will receive more particle collisions than the previous two runs together. ATLAS (short for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) detects minute subatomic fragments from particle collisions and is used to search for the Higgs boson, dark matter and additional dimensions. CMS (short for Compact Muon Solenoid) is a general purpose detector that uses various systems for observations similar to ATLAS.

Scientists are watching the restart of the Large Hadron Collider on April 22, 2022 to start Run 3 on the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. (Photo credit: CERN/Ordan, Julien Marius; Fichet, Jacques Hervé)

In addition to ATLAS and CMS, ALICE’s particle accelerator experiment for heavy ion collisions will be able to detect 50 times more collisions thanks to its upgrade, while another instrument, called the LHCb, will see its detection ability increase threefold, according to CERN.

“The unprecedented number of collisions will allow international teams of physicists at CERN and around the world to study the Higgs boson in great detail and put the Standard Model of particle physics and its various extensions to the most stringent test yet,” CERN officials wrote in the statement.

Two new experiments on the LHC will be activated for operation 3. Called the Advanced Search Experiment (FASER) and the LHC’s Scattering and Neutrino Detector ([email protected]), they are expected to explore new physics beyond the Standard Model, measuring the number of times Antimatter Modeling and Physics Exploration cosmic rays And a strange state of matter called quark gluon plasma.

It will take several weeks from start-up before the revamped LHC is ready for actual scientific measurements. CERN officials said these scientific courses are expected to start in the summer.

Once Run 3 ends in 2024, CERN scientists will shut down it for further planned overhauls which will include more upgrades to the massive particle accelerator. Once complete, these upgrades will allow scientists to rename the Large Hadron Collider the “High Luminous Large Hadron Collider” once it reopens in 2028.

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