Posted: 04/07/2022 – 09:40 Modified: 04/07/2022 – 09:47
Ten years after he helped reveal the existence of the particle known as the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to begin breaking protons with each other at unprecedented energy levels in its search for understand how the universe works.
The world’s most powerful particle collider began warming up in April after a three-year hiatus for upgrades.
As of Tuesday, it will operate for nearly four years at a record 13.6 trillion electron volts, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
For technicians, an electronvolt is the amount of kinetic energy gained or lost by a single electron that accelerates from rest through a one-volt electric potential difference in a vacuum. An electronvolt is equal to 1.602176634 × 10−19 J. It will not turn the refrigerator or turn on the lights.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will send two beams of protons, particles that are in the nucleus of an atom, in opposite directions almost at the speed of light around a 27-kilometer ring buried at 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss border.
The resulting collisions will be recorded on a special film and analyzed by thousands of scientists in the ongoing effort to investigate dark matter, dark energy and other fundamental physical mysteries.
Is Higgs the only boson?
The increased energy of the improved collider will allow researchers to further investigate the Higgs boson, which the Large Hadron Collider first revealed in 2012.
The discovery revolutionized physics, in part because the boson confirmed the current dominant theory, the so-called standard model, which explains the fundamental particles that make up matter and the forces that govern them.
However, several recent findings have raised questions about the standard model. In this context, the recently updated collider will examine the Higgs boson in more detail.
“The Higgs boson is related to some of the deepest open-ended questions in current fundamental physics,” said CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti.
Joachim Mnich, head of research and computer science at CERN, said there was still much to learn about the boson.
“Is the Higgs boson really a fundamental particle or is it a compound?” he asked.
“Is it the only Higgs-like particle that exists, or are there others?”
Pass me a tetraquark
Previous experiments have determined the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as more than 60 composite particles predicted by the standard model, such as the tetraquark.
Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theoretical physics department, said that particle observation is only part of the job.
“Particle physics doesn’t just want to understand the how, but our goal is to understand the why,” he said.
Among the Large Hadron Collider’s nine experiments are ALICE, which probes matter that existed in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, and LHCf, which uses collisions to simulate cosmic rays.
After this four-year period, the collider will return in 2029 as a high-brightness LHC, increasing the number of detectable events by a factor of 10.
Beyond that, scientists are already planning a Future Circular Collider: a 100-kilometer magnetic ring that will reach energies of 100 trillion electron volts, seven times more powerful than the LHC.
And it still doesn’t work for your fridge.