LONDON: The Large Hadron Collider or LHC gets back on line this month following a two-year refit and upgrade which will see it smashing atoms with almost twice the power it previously had.
The higher energies will open new windows into previously unexplored realms of particle physics.
“This is really the exciting phase of the LHC looking for physics beyond what we know” says LHC Atlas detector research scientist Dr Martin Sevior of the University of Melbourne.
The restart follows a busy non-stop three-year research program which culminated with the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the long sort-after particle responsible for producing the Higgs field which gives all elemental particles mass.
“We expected to find the Higgs boson because the standard model of particle physics works so well, it would have been really strange if we hadn’t found it. Now we move into the highest energy levels ever run and we’re looking to see what’s there!”
Hopefully, the souped-up collider will allow physicists to discover something they don’t expect, he says.
“All the things we talk about [below] would be fun to discover. It would be even more fun to discover things we haven’t even thought of.”
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