The upgrade of the LHC will allow scientists to search for new discoveries which have so far been out of reach.
- Andy Parker
Early on Easter Sunday, the Large Hadron Collider’s second run got underway, when proton beams began rotating in the 27-kilometre ring for the first time in two years. Over the coming weeks, the beams will be accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light, running at the unprecedented energy of 13 Terra-electron-volts (TeV), well above the 8 TeV level of the last run, which discovered the long-sought Higgs boson in 2012.
The new run will subject the Standard Model of particle physics to its toughest tests yet, and may help identify some of the fundamental forces of nature that the Standard Model does not include. With 13 TeV proton-proton collisions expected before summer, the LHC experiments will soon be exploring uncharted territory in particle physics.
Cambridge researchers at CERN are playing a major part in preparing the ATLAS detector – the largest of LHC’s seven particle detectors – for action with new upgraded systems ready to go to work as soon as the beam start to collide. All the preparations are in place to being to analyse the data and early results could be expected before the end of the year if all goes well.
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Image: 3D dipole integration panoramic poster
Credit: CERN
Reproduced courtesy of University of Cambridge
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