CERN’s accelerator restarts

After three years of shutdown in order to maintain and upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider – LHC) of European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest and now more powerful than ever, will today officially begin the new period of collecting data from subatomic particle collisions (LHC Run 3) with a higher energy than ever before (13.6 TEV or teraelectronvolts).

The limited trial run of the accelerator started in April and now it’s time for the official full relaunch. The LHC will operate non-stop for about four years, during which time physicists look forward to major new discoveries, possibly on a similar scale to the discovery of the Higgs boson ten years ago.

Two beams of protons – particles in the nucleus of the atom – will travel at almost the speed of light from opposite directions and collide inside the 27km-long underground accelerator 100m below the French-Swiss border. The collisions will be recorded and analyzed by thousands of scientists from many countries (including Greece), who make up the groups of experiments.

“We aim to achieve 1.6 billion collisions between protons per secondsaid Mike Lamont, CERN’s head of accelerators and technology. Compared to the first run of the accelerator (Run 1), it is estimated that about 20 times more collisions will be achieved this time.

Already the four major experiments (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE) using the large accelerator have upgraded their own detector systems, which will now allow them to collect significantly larger and better quality data samples from the collisions.

Including, Scientists they will further study the nature of the Higgs boson, the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, the properties of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, while some dream of finally solving the mystery of “dark” matter.

The two independent international scientific teams of the ATLAS and CMS experiments released on July 4 – on the occasion of the exact ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson (July 4, 2012) – the most comprehensive studies to date of the properties of the ” particle of God”.

Their two publications in the journal “Nature” show that these properties are remarkably compatible and consistent with those predicted for the boson in question by the Standard Standard, the “bible” of particle physics. Studies also show that the particle is increasingly becoming a powerful tool for searching for new unknown phenomena that – if eventually found – will shed light on mysteries such as the nature of dark matter.

The Higgs boson it is the particle manifestation of a ubiquitous quantum field, known as the Higgs field, which is fundamental to the description of the known universe. Without it, elementary particles such as quarks (components of the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei), as well as electrons surrounding the nucleus, would have no mass, and so would heavy particles (W bosons), which are carriers of the weak nuclear force.

Further study of the Higgs particle and field will become possible through the new “round” of collisions at CERN in the next four years and, even more, after the expected new major upgrade of the accelerator after 2029 (High-Luminosity LHC or HL-LHC). Among other things, the first observations of how the Higgs boson interacts with itself are expected. Other questions also beg to be answered, such as whether the Higgs particle is indeed elementary or a composite of others, as well as whether it is the only one or if there are other similar particles in nature.

Also, the smaller experiments at the large accelerator (TOTEM, LHCf, MoEDAL-MAPP, FASER and SND@LHC) are going to explore in the coming years various phenomena within the Standard Standard of Physics and beyond, from magnetic monopoles to neutrinos and cosmic rays. In the far future, scientists are making plans for a larger Future Circular Collider, a 100 km ring that will operate at energies of 100 TEV.

The official start of the new season of LHC Run 3 will be broadcast in the afternoon live by CERN via its social media channels (with a start time of 17:00 Greek time).

View the news feed and get the latest news.