Large Hadron Collider Startup Has Begun, More Experiments Coming in 2015

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, and in just a few months time it’s going to be more powerful than ever before. Having discovered the Higgs particle in 2012, the subatomic particle which helps explain why things in our universe have mass. Now the multitude of scientists working on the project from around the world will be firing up the newly upgraded LHC for its encore performance.

“There’s a huge amount of physics to be done,” said Heuer, speaking Monday at a press briefing at the Euroscience Open Forum in Copenhagen.

LCH has been offline for a couple of years now for maintenance and upgrades which will allow it to run at double the power of previous tests, which will be the highest energy level ever reached by a particle accelerator. Finding the Higgs was only the start and now the teams look set to push the limits to see what else is lurking in the world of subatomic particles.

“If we increase our [energetic] reach, we may see the brothers of the Higgs,” said Samira Hassani, a particle physicist at France’s Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA)

The week 1/8th of the collider was cooled to its super cool operating temperature of -271.3 degrees Celsius, which is a temperature colded than that space, and some of the collider beams were also started up for the first time in two years as they prepare the 7 mile long collider for new experiments that will begin in January.

Thank you NatGeo for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of NatGeo.