CERN’s particle accelerator starts up after a three-year hiatus

CERN

Two beams of protons whizzed around the Large Hadron collider on Friday, marking the return of the world's largest particle accelerator after three years on hiatus. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research spent the past three years doing maintenance on their system. Scientists hope the four-year data collection will reveal new secrets of the universe.

The ability for our experiment to detect, collect and analyze data will be two to three times better, according to a particle physicist from Queen Mary University of London.

This summer will be the start of the third run of the LHC. The upgrade over the past few years mean that this run will see higher numbers of particle collisions, and that those particles will collide with greater energy than anything seen in previous runs. The Standard Model of physics explains how particles interact on a subatomic level. Along with other experiments, they will try and find new particles, and maybe even get a clearer picture of dark matter, a substance that scientists believe accounts for a large percentage of the universe. It hasn't been proven yet.

Ten years ago, the discovery of the Higgs boson was a landmark finding, and new projects will scrutinize it in more detail.

Bona said that they have worked for the past three years updating the machinery. We are ready.