CERN scientists will launch the 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider (LHC) once again this week after a long shutdown caused by maintenance, upgrades and delays in COVID-19, according to a Reuters report.
The LHC was shut down after its successful second run in December 2018. Planned maintenance and upgrade work followed, but its third cycle was also delayed due to the pandemic.
Now, three years later, rebooting will be a complicated process and is not guaranteed to go smoothly on the first try.
“This is not a push of a button,” Rende Steyrenberg, who is in charge of operations in the control room, told Reuters. The system should work “like an orchestra,” he said, and “it comes with a certain sense of tension, nervousness.”
“In order for the beam to orbit, all of these magnets must perform the right functions and the right things at the right time,” he continued.
The materials inside the LHC will face temperature fluctuations of nearly 300 degrees, and the thousands of magnets used to concentrate particles in a tight beam will need to be carefully calibrated to make everything work.
From the discovery of the “particle of God” to the discovery of dark matter
The LHC was first launched in 2008, and a batch of collisions observed between 2010-2013 provided the first evidence of the Higgs boson particle, also known as the “God particle”, believed to have played a vital role. role in the formation of the early universe.
This is the largest physics laboratory in the world. In March, CERN announced that it would stop cooperating with Russian scientists after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The European organization is also planning a successor to the LHC, the future circular collider worth 20 billion euros ($ 21.9 billion).
Physicists hope that the LHC will continue to help the scientific community in its study of “ghost particles” and other mysterious phenomena.
Many CERN scientists are turning their attention to the discovery of dark matter, a mysterious energy that is five times more common than ordinary matter, but has so far avoided direct detection. So far, the LHC has provided mainly evidence of which particles do not constitute dark matter.
In a post on CERN’s website, dark matter theorist Tim Tate of UC Irvine said: “The LHC has really broken new ground in the search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, covering a wide range of predicted potential signals or producing dark matter. matter, or by the production of particles, mediating its interactions with ordinary matter. ”
“All the observed results are consistent with models that do not include dark matter and give us important information about what types of particles can no longer explain it,” he continued.
In an interview with Reuters, Steerenberg explained that the next launch of LHC CERN will “dramatically increase the number of collisions and therefore the likelihood of new discoveries.” Once restarted, the collider is expected to operate until another planned shutdown between 2025 and 2027.
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