Large Hadron Collider Breaks Proton Record Only Days After 3-Year Shutdown

Europe's Large Hadron collider has started up its beams again after a three-year shut down for maintenance.

It only took a couple of days for the pilot streams of protons to reach a record energy level. The previous record of 6.5 TeV was set at the start of the particle collider's second run.

The new level is very close to the design energy of the LHC, which is 7 TeV, according to a video announcing the milestone.

When the collider at the French-Swiss border restarts honest-to-goodness science operations, the international team plans to address mysteries that could send theories of physics in new directions.

Wenninger and his colleagues are sending beams of protons through a ring of magnets.

Engineers want to make sure that the collider can be operated safely in the wake of the changes made during the shutdown, and avoid a costly repair operation like the one that had to be done shortly after the collider was turned on.

The machines and facilities underwent major upgrades during the second long shutdown of the complex, according to a news release.

Thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, the LHC will deliver more data to the upgraded experiments and will operate at an even higher energy.

The data collected during the first run pointed to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The second run brought an increase in energy and luminosity, but there were no discoveries of the Higgs-level. The third run is due to last until 2026.

Over the past three years, the team has upgraded the system to narrow the focus of the beams.

30 million particle-bunch crossing per second is analyzed by the analytical software. Two new experiments, FASER and SND@LHC, were added to the existing lineup of detectors to look for phenomena that go beyond the Standard Model of physics.

The nature of dark matter is more abundant than the ordinary matter that we see in the Universe. They could confirm the existence of as-yet-unseen supersymmetric particles, or extra dimensions, or a fifth fundamental force of nature.

SamHarper, a team member for the LHC's CMS detector, told the BBC that he has been hunting for the fifth force for as long as he has been a particle physicist.

Maybe this is the year.

The article was published by Universe Today. The original article is worth a read.