Two proton beams surrounded CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last Friday, and after a hiatus of more than three years, the return of the world’s largest particle accelerator is official. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has spent the last three years doing maintenance work and major updates to the system. Now the group is preparing to begin a four-year data collection process that scientists hope will reveal new secrets of the universe.
“Our experiment will be two to three times better in terms of its ability to detect, collect and analyze data,” particle physicist Marcella Bona at Queen Mary University of London said in a conversation with the BBC.
This summer, the third run of the LHC, called Run Three (Run 3), will begin. Updates over the past few years mean that more particle collisions will be seen in this study, and that these particles will collide with more energy than seen in previous studies.
Scientists will use new capabilities to test the limits of the Standard Model of Physics, a theory that explains how particles interact at the subatomic level. Along with other experiments, they will try to find new kinds of particles and perhaps even capture a clearer picture of dark matter, an as-yet-undiscovered matter that scientists believe makes up a large percentage of the universe. However, it should be noted that even the existence of this substance has not been proven yet.
The new process will further examine the Higgs boson, a groundbreaking particle discovered during experiments at the LHC a decade ago.
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