WASHINGTON: The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, last seen discovering the Higgs boson, switches back on after a two-year hiatus nearly twice as powerful as before. Science reporter Ivan Semeniuk charts its new push into the unknown.
Asimina Arvanitaki was just a small child growing up in Greece when plans were first being drawn up for the Large Hadron Collider. By the time its powerful proton beams were switched on for the first time in 2008, she had a newly minted PhD from Stanford University.
But only now, as a 35-year-old faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., is Dr. Arvanitaki about to access a realm she has been waiting to explore her entire academic life.This month, the Large Hadron Collider – the LHC – comes into its own.
As the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the LHC is already famous. The collider, located near the foothills of the Jura Mountains west of Geneva, Switzerland, is where scientists finally chased down the long-hypothesized particle known as the Higgs boson. That achievement, announced in 2012, effectively completed the Standard Model of particle physics, the most formidable description of the basic constituents of nature that humans have ever devised. It was the culmination of a quest that began more than a century earlier with J.J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron in 1897.
Yet even while physicists were hungering for the Higgs, it was only ever meant to be an appetizer for the LHC. “In a sense, the Higgs was a sure bet,” Dr. Arvanitaki said. “We knew it had to be there.”
Now comes round two and all bets are off. After a lengthy hiatus and a complete overhaul, the LHC is about to switch back on with its power nearly doubled. This time the goal is to push onward into the unknown. It means the curtain is about to rise on a period of raw discovery that is relatively rare in science. And after decades of work by thousands of researchers and many billions of dollars spent, it’s Dr. Arvanitaki’s generation that now find itself in the midst of the action.
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