CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumed operation last week after a three-year hiatus for maintenance and upgrades, and soon after, it was announced that two proton beams had been accelerated to a record energy of 6.8 tera-electron volts per beam (TeV).
LHC, a particle collider about 17 miles in diameter at Switzerland. The circular collider has been instrumental in breakthroughs in physics, including the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. It was shut down twice for extended periods of time so scientists could make improvements to its efficiency. The last shutdown, which lasted three years, recently ended, and the machine is back with a metaphorical bang.
LHC head of beam operations and LHC machine coordinator Jörg Wenninger said in a CERN video, “This is a very long commissioning period that will allow us to actually collide two beams for experiments and ensure the highest-energy collisions should occur six to eight weeks from now.” only the beginning,” he said.
LHC scientists delivered proton beams to 1.18 TeV energy in 2009. Since then, the collider has broken its own records several times, as the CERN team has increased its ability to energize beams of subatomic particles. The new 6.8 TeV record has reached almost the energy for which the LHC was designed, 7 TeV per beam.
Recent improvements enable experiments at higher energies and scientists get more data from experiments. The next LHC run (Run 3) is expected to begin this summer and will take four years. This will increase the number of required experiments like ATLAS and CMS, while the number of collisions of the LHCb (the experiment that detected a new exotic particle last year) will also triple, CERN says. The ALICE detector, which examines the quark-gluon plasma, is expected to reach 50 times the number of ion collisions it has done before.
CERN engineers are working on a major improvement of the LHC, called the High Luminance LHC (HL-LHC), which aims to increase the collider’s brightness by a factor of 10. This version is aimed to be ready by 2029.
There are still a few years of physics work to be done for these long-term plans to bear fruit, but we can say that a good start has been made…
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