After a three-year shut down, the Large Hadron collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) is back up and running.
After the second run of the LHC ended in December, teams were shut down for updates while they prepared for Run 3, which is expected to begin in the spring. The team at the collider has been preparing for new experiments as major upgrades are made to boost its power and capabilities.
Scientists are eager to explore dark matter, the leading theory describing all known fundamental forces and elementary particles in the universe, as well as the new upgrades to the LHC that could potentially expand our understanding of the standard model of physics.
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There were some delays in work due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but the latest shutdown was pre-planned for these upgrades. John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN, said that the fact that there hasn't been so much news coming out of the LHC in the last year or so would have happened anyway.
The best way to smash protons into one another is to accelerate them to near the speed of light.
Phil Allport, a particle physics detector expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK, told NewScient that the measurement sheds light on what is happening at the highest energies that we can reach.
The high-energy collisions could allow researchers to think outside of the box with their experiments and try to understand things that the standard model does not explain.
Physicists explore unknowns like dark matter and dark energy, and all of their theories make predictions, because they require extensions to the standard model of particle physics. The best place to test those predictions is in the highest energies possible.
Ellis is interested in exploring a particular finding that happened during the shutdown.
Ellis said that he was intrigued by the evidence that when bottom quarks decay, they may do so in a way that discriminates between electrons and muons.
The findings from the LHCb experiment, which investigated the differences between matter and antimatter, show that they don't behave the same way. Ellis said there was a significant difference.
Ellis said there is still a lot of work to be done before the findings are confirmed as a concrete discovery. It would be a major, major discovery if confirmed.
The new upgrades have increased the power of the injectors which feed beams of particles into the collider. At the time of the previous shutdown, the collider could accelerate beams up to an energy of 6.5 Teraelectronvolts, and that value has been raised to 6.8 Teraelectronvolts.
The energy that an electron gains when it travels through a vold is called the tetheh potential.
To increase the energy of the protons to such an extreme level, the thousands of superconducting magnets, whose fields direct the beams around their trajectory, need to grow accustomed to much stronger currents after a long period of inactivity. Getting the equipment up to speed in this upgrade is a process that is called Magnet training and is made up of about 12,000 individual tests.
With the upgraded equipment, the LHC will be able to create collisions at higher energies than ever before, expanding the possibilities for what scientists can find.
As part of its ongoing upgrades, the team is considering implementing graphics processing units to be used as efficient computer processors for the collider, as it analyzes and processes an incredible wealth of data.
The upgrade programme of the Large Hadron Collider poses a range of exciting computing challenges and can be supported by the use of graphics processing units.
The upgrade of the colliders will take place after Run 3. NewScientist reported that the number of accidents will increase from 40 to between 120 and 250. The Large Hadron Collider will be transformed so dramatically that it will be renamed. The online version of the HL-LHC is set to come in 2028.
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