Large Hadron Collider Restarts
hubie writes:
The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator has restarted after a break of more than three years for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work. Today, 22 April, at 12:16 CEST, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider's 27-kilometre ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV).
"These beams circulated at injection energy and contained a relatively small number of protons. High-intensity, high-energy collisions are a couple of months away," says the Head of CERN's Beams department, Rhodri Jones. "But first beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown."
[...] Pilot beams circulated in the LHC for a brief period in October 2021. However, the beams that circulated today mark not only the end of the second long shutdown for the LHC but also the beginning of preparations for four years of physics-data taking, which is expected to start this summer.
[...] This third run of the LHC, called Run 3, will see the machine's experiments collecting data from collisions not only at a record energy but also in unparalleled numbers.[...]
The unprecedented number of collisions will allow international teams of physicists at CERN and across the world to study the Higgs boson in great detail and put the Standard Model of particle physics and its various extensions to the most stringent tests yet.
Other things to look forward to in Run 3 include the operation of two new experiments, FASER and SND@LHC, designed to look for physics beyond the Standard Model; special proton-helium collisions to measure how often the antimatter counterparts of protons are produced in these collisions; and collisions involving oxygen ions that will improve physicists' knowledge of cosmic-ray physics and the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
See also: CERN video
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