Finally out of its 3 year break, the Large Hadron Collider, which is located underground in the Alps, is back to smashing atoms together and has already begun to break some records.
This incredible piece of machinery is the world’s biggest particle accelerator buried between Switzerland and France and operated by CERN. It consists of twenty seven kilometres long ring of superconducting magnets. These are used to smash the ions and protons together at nearing the speed of light to help scientists understand dark and antimatter as well as particle physics and the origins of matter itself.
After being closed for a couple years due to upgrades and repairs it “will now operate at an even higher energy and “will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments” Mike Lamont (CERN’S director of accelerators and technology) promises. Since its reopening on April 22nd two beams of protons have been accelerated and broken a record. They reached and energy of 6.8 trillion electronvolts per beam, which beats the 2015 record of the LHC’s second run of 6.5 trillion electronvolts.
This summer the third major run of the LHC is all planned where scientists are going to try to break this new record again and hoping to reach energy outputs of 13.6 TeV. Not only will they be trying to achieve a new record but collecting much more information and data from these collisions than before.
So what does all of this mean? Well, these data collections will have very large impacts on the physics of the universe that we know of today as over the next upcoming months the researchers at CERN are looking to find more cracks in the current standard model theory like the recent crack discovered at Fermilab earlier this month.
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