Large Hadron Collider is waking up after a 3-year nap, and it could help explain why the universe exists.

The world's largest particle collider is getting ready to smash atoms harder.

After a three-year break, the Large Hadron Collider is ready to power up for its third, and most powerful, experimental period. Scientists will begin experiments in June and ramp up to full power by the end of July if all initial tests and checks go well, according to experts.

The new run could help to explain why the universe is made of dark matter, which exerts gravity but does not interact with light.

The completion of the so-called Long Shut-down 2, originally planned for two years but extended by one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, gave the opportunity to deploy the countless, both preventive and corrective, maintenance operations.

The Standard Model that describes fundamental forces and particles in the universe has been missing since 2008, and the last piece has been found by smashing atoms together at incredible speeds.

Is it possible that the universe exists?

In the upcoming third run, the collider will focus on exploring the properties of particles in the Standard Model, as well as hunting for evidence of dark matter.

In addition to other tasks, the largest particle detector at the LHC will try to answer a question that has puzzled scientists for decades: Why are all the neutrinos detected so far southpaws? The left and right-handed flavors of particles describe how they spin and move, and are thought to have antimatter twins. In theory, right-handed neutrinos should exist, but no one has ever found an antimatter twin to an ordinary one. According to a statement from the ATLAS Collaboration, they will be looking for a left-handed relative to the neutrino called a heavy neutral lepton.

Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez, an education and outreach coordinator for the ATLAS Collaboration, is excited to get data again and see what we can see in the different searches.

The Scattering and Neutrino Detector and the Forward Search Experiment are new physics experiments that will be introduced during the upcoming LHC run. FASER will use a detector located 1,575 feet from the collision site to collect exotic particles that can travel long distances before decaying into detectable particles. High-energy neutrinos, which are known to be produced at the collision site but have never been detected, will be detected by FASER and SND. Scientists will be able to understand these particles in greater detail thanks to such detections.

They may address another problem. It is thought that matter and antimatter were produced in the same amount. They should have left nothing behind on contact. Our universe is mostly matter.

The nature of dark matter, the origin of neutrino, and the balance of matter and antimatter are some of the biggest puzzles in physics.

The new upgrades will allow the LHC to smash particles harder than ever before, up to an energy of 6.8 Teraelectronvolts, an increase over the previous limit of 6.5 Teraelectronvolts, which could enable the LHC to see new types of particles. It will be easier for scientists to find rare particles when the LHC smashes atoms together more often. High-quality data will be gathered by the instruments when the detector upgrades are completed. Only a fraction of the data will be saved and studied. The automated systems that process the data and select the most interesting events have been improved by scientists.

1.7 billion collisions per second are produced by Lhc. It is impossible to keep all that data, so we need to have a strategy to pick the events that we think are interesting.

The third run will last until the end of the century. Scientists are discussing the next round of upgrades to be implemented after Run 3 for the High luminosity phase, which will increase the number of simultaneous collisions and energies.

It was originally published on Live Science.