As of 10:40 a.m. CET (5:40 a.m. ET), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was running at record-breaking energies and collecting science data. Physicists now expect the particle collider to run non-stop for the next 3 years. We are in a new era of high-energy particle physics where, for the first time, we don’t exactly know what we’ll find.
“With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning,” said CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry in a press release. “It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all of the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen.”
Today, LHC engineers and scientists announced they had “stable beams” in the LHC’s 27 kilometer (17 mile) long ring of supercooled electromagnets — meaning the protons that are injected into the experiment are suitable for the numerous detectors linked with the LHC can begin taking science data. Now that stability has been achieved, more protons will be pumped around the accelerator until the LHC has the ability to produce up to 1 billion particle collisions per second.
The prime mission of the LHC during Run 1 (that started in 2008) was to detect and characterize the “missing piece” of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson. This particle, which mediates the Higgs field that is thought to permeate the entire universe, endows all matter with mass. But to detect the Higgs, never before seen particle energies were required. Its historic discovery was announced in July 2012, resulting in the Nobel Prize for Physics being awarded to the physicists who first theorized the Higgs mechanism in the 1960′s.
Now, the power of the LHC has been ramped-up to 13 TeV, almost double the energy that produced the Higgs boson discovery.
“The first 3-year run of the LHC, which culminated with a major discovery in July 2012, was only the start of our journey. It is time for new physics!” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.”
We are truly at the leading edge of science discovery where, over the coming 3 years, our view on the universe could completely change. Although physicists are pinning their hopes on the LHC to produce elusive dark matter particles, an answer to why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe and maybe even provide hints of supersymmetry, they also hope that something entirely unexpected pops out of the data. Should this happen, the data recorded by the LHC’s four main refurbished experiments — ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb — and 3 smaller experiments — TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL — could take decades to understand.
“The collisions we are seeing today indicate that the work we have done in the past two years to prepare and improve our detector has been successful and marks the beginning of a new era of exploration of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. “We can hardly express our excitement within the collaboration: this is especially true for the youngest colleagues.”
Read more at Discovery News
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