The world's biggest physics experiment came back online today, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was restarted after a two-year upgrade.
Last time, it found a particle scientists had been searching a half century for. This time, they're going after an even bigger prize.
This morning, just after 9:30am (local time), the biggest scientific experiment in the world came back online.
For two years, the LHC has been switched off, as scientists and engineers checked and upgraded the thousands of components and detectors.
Now they have a collider that is twice as powerful as it was before.
"I was looking at the live blog from CERN as the beam was going around the ring," says Professor Daniel Tovey from Sheffield University.
"It's all tremendously exciting. Then we saw the beams passing through the experiments, including Atlas. We saw the detectors lighting up like Christmas trees."
The LHC sits underground in Geneva, a 27km ring with four huge detectors – Atlas, CMS, Alice and LHCb.
It accelerates particles to nearly the speed of light and then collides them inside the detectors.
Scientists examine the debris of the collisions to find hints of new particles and new physics.
Two years ago, British physicist Peter Higgs was in the audience at CERN when it was announced they had discovered the Higgs boson – the fundamental particle that he had predicted 50 years earlier and that gives everything else mass.
Now they will investigate dark matter, a mysterious substance that astronomers know makes up large parts of the universe but has never been seen directly.
At this experiment, scientists will try to make antimatter, which looks like normal matter but has the opposite electrical charge.
"What this new run will show us, I hope, is a whole new level of reality, a deeper understanding of the physics underlying our universe, and I can't wait to get started," says Professor Tara Shears at Liverpool University.
Now they know the upgrade is working, engineers will slowly ramp up the energy of the particle beams and make their first particle collisions within weeks. Then, the new physics can begin.
ITV News
source: newshub archive
