Ten years after discovering the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to begin crushing protons at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.
The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider resumed in April after a three-year hiatus for upgrades in preparation for its third run.
Starting Tuesday, it will operate for nearly four years at a record 13.6 trillion electron volts, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week.
It will send two beams of protons (particles in the nucleus of an atom) in opposite directions at almost the speed of light around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring buried 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss border.
The resulting collisions will be recorded and analyzed by thousands of scientists as part of a series of experiments, including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb, that will use the enhanced power to investigate dark matter, dark energy and others. fundamental mysteries.
– 1.6 billion collisions per second –
“Our goal is to provide 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second” for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, said CERN’s head of accelerators and technology Mike Lamont.
This time, the proton beams will be reduced to less than 10 microns (a human hair is about 70 microns thick) to increase the collision rate, he added.
The new energy rate will allow them to further investigate the Higgs boson, which the Large Hadron Collider first observed on July 4, 2012.
The discovery revolutionized physics in part because the boson fit within the standard model, the main theory of all the fundamental particles that make up matter and the forces that govern them.
However, several recent findings have raised questions about the standard model, and the recently updated collider will examine the Higgs boson in more depth.
“The Higgs boson is related to some of the deepest open questions in today’s fundamental physics,” said CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti, who first announced the discovery of the boson a decade ago.
Compared to the first collider test that discovered the boson, this time there will be 20 times more collisions.
“This is a significant increase, paving the way for new discoveries,” Lamont said.
Joachim Mnich, head of research and computer science at CERN, said there was still much to learn about the boson.
“Is the Higgs boson really a fundamental particle or is it a compound?” he asked.
“Is it the only Higgs-like particle that exists, or are there others?”
– “New physics season” –
Previous experiments have determined the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as more than 60 composite particles predicted by the standard model, such as the tetraquark.
But Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theoretical physics department, said particle observation is only part of the job.
“Particle physics doesn’t just want to understand the how, but our goal is to understand the why,” he said.
Among the Large Hadron Collider’s nine experiments are ALICE, which probes matter that existed in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, and LHCf, which uses collisions to simulate cosmic rays.
After this race, the collider will return in 2029 as a high-brightness LHC, increasing the number of detectable events by a factor of 10.
Beyond that, scientists are planning a Future Circular Collider: a 100-kilometer ring that aims to reach energies of about 100 trillion electron volts.
But for now, physicists are looking forward to the results of the third test of the Large Hadron Collider.
“A new physics season is beginning,” CERN said.
by Pierre CELERIER