Matthew Sparkes is a writer.
The Large Hadron collider has been offline for some time.
It's at the CERN.
After three years of being offline due to the covid-19 epidemic, the Large Hadron collider will start running again. The particle collider will return with improvements that will give it a power boost.
Calibration of new equipment and tests on the collider are underway. The data needed to expand the standard model of how particles and forces interact will be provided by the upcoming experiments.
Phil Allport at the University of Birmingham in the UK says that the upgrades could allow new measurements that give us insight into the way the Higgs boson decays, leading to a better understanding of how it fits into the standard model.
He says that the measurement sheds light on what is happening at the highest energies that we can reach. He says that they will allow us to test ideas that try to account for things that aren't fully described by the standard model.
The so-called hierarchy problem is one of the mysteries that physicists have been plagued with for decades.
All of the theories make predictions because they all have extensions to the standard model of particle physics. The best place to test those predictions is in the highest energy possible. He says that the upgrade to the LHC paves the way to entirely new observations that signal a departure from the standard model.
Part of the upgrade work has been to increase the power of the injectors. Prior to the last shutdown, protons could reach an energy of 6.5 Teraelectronvolts, but the upgrades mean this can now be pushed to 6.8 Teraelectronvolts.
The more powerful beams will cause more particles to collide at the same time, and other upgrades in the future will allow more particles to be collided at the same time.
The number of collisions that take place will be greatly increased by the plans for further improvements in 2024. The run saw around 40 collisions every time a pulse of protons passed, but will see between 120 and 250 this year. The High luminosity Large Hadron collider will be christened at that point, and will begin experiments in the year 2028.
There are still many tests to be run before the power of the new components can be unleashed. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research hope to finish these by late February and then start to build up a small number of full-power collisions in May. In June, Steerenberg says "meaningful" physics will begin.
There are more on these topics.
A large collider.
It's at the CERN.
