MEXICO: The Large Hadron Collider, built by Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has undergone major upgrades this year and will soon begin its second three-year run. Cern said that, after a two-year break, the collider will be twice as powerful.
It is already credited with helping physicists discover the elusive Higgs boson, which gives objects their mass. The discovery won the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics.
This year, the atom-smasher will restart with substantially higher particle-beam energy.
The goal is to find out why there is much more matter than antimatter in today’s universe.
A discovery “could be as early as this year … if we are really lucky,” said Beate Heinemann, professor of physics at the University of California in Berkeley, US.
Supersymmetry is an extension of the standard model of physics and fills in some big gaps in our understanding of the underlying nature of matter.
According to the theory of supersymmetry, all particles have a heavier counterpart and scientists believe that, if these partner particles actually exist, the collider will be able to detect them.
The first step in getting the collider back in action began on December 9. The process will take several months.
