Image: Julian Herzog [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
“Major” upgrade means collider can achieve “unprecedented” numbers of collisions
The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has been restarted by Europe’s intergovernmental organisation for nuclear research, Cern, after a three-year break for maintenance and upgrades.
Located near Geneva, the LHC was switched off to make it even more powerful and able to carry out “unprecedented” numbers of particle collisions so researchers can further probe fundamental questions in physics.
On 22 April two beams of protons were once again circulated around the LHC’s 27km ring, Cern announced.
“The machines and facilities underwent major upgrades during the second long shutdown of Cern’s accelerator complex,” said the organisation’s director for accelerators and technology, Mike Lamont.
“The LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation programme and will now operate at an even higher energy and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, it will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments.”
High-energy collisions are still a couple of months away as scientists will gradually build up the machine’s capacity.
The proton beams circulated mark the start of preparations for four years of data collection, which is expected start in the summer with the LHC’s third run.
Cern said the upgrades mean an “unprecedented” number of collisions will allow physicists to study the Higgs boson fundamental particle in greater detail and put the so-called standard model of particle physics to its “most stringent tests yet”.
It also announced that it had started construction of a new energy-efficient data centre in Prévessin, France, which will play a “vital” role in meeting the computing needs of the LHC’s upgrades.