A decade after it was discovered, the Large Hadron collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.
After a three-year break, the world's largest and most powerful particle collider was back up and running in April.
It will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts.
It will send two beams of protons, particles in the nucleus of an atom, in opposite directions.
The resulting collision will be recorded and analyzed by thousands of scientists as part of a raft of experiments, which will use the enhanced power to probe dark matter and other fundamental mysteries.
"Our goal is to deliver 1.6 billion protons-proton collisions per second for the experiments", said the head of accelerators and technology at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The collision rate will be increased because the beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns.
The new energy rate will allow them to continue their investigation into the existence of the elusive particle known as the 'Helicopter boson'.
The Standard Model is the theory of all the fundamental particles that make up matter.
Several recent findings have raised questions about the Standard Model and the newly upgraded collider will look at it in more detail.
The director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) said that the discovery of the Higgs boson is related to some of the most profound open questions in fundamental physics today.
This time around there will be 20 times more crashes compared to the first run.
The way for new discoveries will be paved by this increase.
The head of research and computing at the European Center for Nuclear Research said there was still more to be learned.
He wanted to know if the particle is a fundamental one or if it is a component.
Are there others like it, or is it the only one?
More than 60 particles predicted by the Standard Model have been determined by past experiments.
The head of the theoretical physics department at the European Organization for Nuclear Research said that observing particles is only part of the job.
The goal of particle physics is to understand why.
ALICE is an experiment that probes the matter that existed in the first 10 microseconds after the Big bang.
The number of events will increase by a factor of 10 after the collider comes back in 2029.
Scientists are planning a 100 kilometer ring that will reach energies of 100 trillion electronvolts in the future.
Physicists are waiting for the results from the third run.
The new physics season is about to start.
Agence France- Presse.
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