The Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator in the world, is operating again after a three-year sabbatical for maintenance and an upgrade with more power, more intense beams, and higher precision.
Nearly four years of nonstop operation at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts are planned for the LHC at CERN, outside of Geneva. The improvements should increase the accuracy of LHC equipment, enable more particle collisions, produce brighter light, and facilitate the finding of new particles in quantum field theory.
[Press Update] The third run of the Large Hadron Collider has successfully started #LHCRun3
— CERNpress (@CERNpress) July 5, 2022
Find out more: https://t.co/PcFRKbBmW6 pic.twitter.com/C7bXpmzdjq
Before its first extended closure, on July 4, 2012, CERN used the LHC to find the Higgs boson. The LHC was then running at 3.5 trillion electronvolts during LHC “Run 1.” (TeVs). Proton beam collisions at 13 TeVs occurred during Run 2 between 2015 and 2018, which was followed by a second lengthy outage. Run 3 at 13.6 TeVs or 6.8 TeV per beam is now scheduled to begin.
“Compared to Run 1, in which the Higgs was discovered with 12 inverse femtobarns, now in Run 3 we will be delivering 280 inverse femtobarns1. This is a significant increase, paving the way for new discoveries.”
CERN’s director of accelerators and technology
By this experiment, researchers are looking for potential sources of dark matter and trying to understand the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the cosmos.
“We’re looking forward to measurements of the Higgs boson decay to second-generation particles such as muons. This would be an entirely new result in the Higgs boson saga, confirming for the first time that second-generation particles also get mass through the Higgs mechanism”
CERN theorist Michelangelo