Imlisanen Jamir
Three years since the shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for maintenance work and upgrades, exciting times in the world of particle physics are in front of us again.
It has now been ten years since the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that gives mass to all matter. And now, scientists are engaged in expanding our understanding of the cosmos, the birth of our universe and its fate.
Recently, it was announced that experiments by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will now begin.
Experiments in the LHC consist of smashing together beams of particles at near speed of light in an absolute vacuum to enable scientists to collect data from the fragmentation of particles to probe the limits of physics as we know it.
Building on its discovery of the Higgs Boson, scientists aim to use the restart of the LHC and study more infinitely small fragments, while further pushing the limits of human knowledge on areas like dark matter or anti-matter.
Over the next few years, scientists from around the world will be able to run new experiments at the LHC. The number of collisions expected to run will be unprecedented. The ATLAS and CMS particle detectors will see more action than in Run 1 and Run 2 combined. The investigation into matter and antimatter will continue with the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment seeing three times as many collisions as before.
CERN on July 3 began its celebrations of the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, followed by a scientific symposium on July 4 and ended on July 5, with collisions at unprecedented energy levels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) marking the launch of the new physics season at CERN’s flagship accelerator.
The event was livestreamed for people worldwide in celebrating past and present achievements for particle physics and science, as well as looking ahead to how CERN is preparing future research.
CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said it was her dream for the LHC’s third run to find particles that make up dark matter. This is the mysterious substance that physicists think accounts for 85% of the matter in the Universe. But the experiments’ goals are not to chase any particular theory but to understand how nature works at the most fundamental level.
These works, as time consuming and frustrating as they can be, are crucial to work out structures of reality and existence beyond the Standard Model.
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