ShareLHC Season 2: new frontiers in physics
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world – is gearing up for its second three-year run
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world – is gearing up for its second three-year run. The eight sectors of the 27 km ring of superconducting magnets, filled with liquid helium, have been cooled to their nominal operating temperature of 1.9 K. The superconducting magnets have been powered, and the first proton beams are now circulating in the machine.
Run 2 of the LHC follows a 2-year technical stop that prepared the machine for operation with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions – compared to 8 TeV in 2012 – an unprecedented achievement by an accelerator.
This higher energy will allow researchers to extend the search for new particles and to test previously unverifiable theories regarding our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter.
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a Higgs boson, a particle with a mass of 125 GeV. However, search for Higgs boson is far from the only scientific goal of LHC research.
Some theories predict that there could be a whole new set of particles to discover that physicists cannot detect as they do not interact through the electromagnetic force. But, if these “dark sector” particles have mass, they will interact with the field associated with the Higgs boson.
Invisible dark matter makes up most of the universe – but we can only detect it from its gravitational effects. Dark matter could contain “supersymmetric particles” – that are partners to those already known in the Standard Model.
Every particle of matter has a corresponding perfectly matching antiparticle, but with opposite charge. However, when matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other, disappearing in a flash of energy. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, so why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe? Operating at higher energy levels will allow the production of more antiparticles for CERN’s antimatter programme – helping physicists to verify if the properties of antimatter differ from those of matter.
Based on CERN press releases:
http://goo.gl/XUGDLX http://goo.gl/oeutOL http://goo.gl/qDSkJr
Additional information provided by Ph. Lebrun, President of IIR Section A
Run 2 of the LHC follows a 2-year technical stop that prepared the machine for operation with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions – compared to 8 TeV in 2012 – an unprecedented achievement by an accelerator.
This higher energy will allow researchers to extend the search for new particles and to test previously unverifiable theories regarding our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter.
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a Higgs boson, a particle with a mass of 125 GeV. However, search for Higgs boson is far from the only scientific goal of LHC research.
Some theories predict that there could be a whole new set of particles to discover that physicists cannot detect as they do not interact through the electromagnetic force. But, if these “dark sector” particles have mass, they will interact with the field associated with the Higgs boson.
Invisible dark matter makes up most of the universe – but we can only detect it from its gravitational effects. Dark matter could contain “supersymmetric particles” – that are partners to those already known in the Standard Model.
Every particle of matter has a corresponding perfectly matching antiparticle, but with opposite charge. However, when matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other, disappearing in a flash of energy. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, so why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe? Operating at higher energy levels will allow the production of more antiparticles for CERN’s antimatter programme – helping physicists to verify if the properties of antimatter differ from those of matter.
Based on CERN press releases:
http://goo.gl/XUGDLX http://goo.gl/oeutOL http://goo.gl/qDSkJr
Additional information provided by Ph. Lebrun, President of IIR Section A