FRANCE: For the first time in two years and after a $150 million repair and maintenance, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start to smash particles at an unprecedented speed on June 3. Scientists hope that the data they would gather could help unveil the mystery of the dark matter and lead to the discovery of other particles.
Sitting in a tunnel 100 meters underground on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator capable of smashing protons or iron to almost the speed of light. The powerful machine has a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets equipped with accelerating structures to boost the particles’ energy.
The overhauled LHC will take data from collissions at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which is nearly twice the collision energy of the underground particle smasher in its first run from 2010 to 2013 that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics also known as the god particle.
“The world’s most powerful accelerator is ready to start its physics programme once again, this time with proton beams colliding 13 TeV – almost double the LHC’s previous energy,” reads the CERN blog. “This new energy frontier will allow researchers to probe new boundaries in our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter.”
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