This Friday, April 22, at 12:16 pm (Spanish Peninsula Time), two proton beams circled in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERNon the French-Swiss border) with an injection energy of 450 billion electron volts (450 GeV).
The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is back in operation after a break of more than three years in which maintenance, consolidation and upgrade tasks were carried out.
“These beams circulated at injection energy and contained a relatively small number of protons. We’re still a few months away from high-intensity, high-energy collisions,” he says. Rhodri Joneshead of CERN’s Beam Department, “but these first beams represent the accelerator’s successful restart after the hard work done during this second major shutdown.”
“Both the machines and facilities underwent significant improvements during this second and long CERN accelerator shutdown,” explains CERN’s Director of Accelerators and Technology, Mike Lamont“and the LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation program and will now operate at even greater power and, thanks to major improvements to the injectors, will provide significantly more data in new LHC experiments.”
In October 2021, several pilot beams circled the LHC for a short period of time. However, the beams circulating today mark not only the end of the LHC’s second long shutdown, but also the beginning of a new physical data collection cycle that will span the next four years and is scheduled to begin this very July. . .
Record energy of 13.6 TeV
Until then, the LHC expert community will work tirelessly to progressively restart the machinery and safely increase the energy and intensity of the beams, with the aim of producing collisions with a record energy of 13.6 billion electron volts (13, 6 TeV).
This third LHC data collection period, called run 3will allow the accelerator’s detectors to collect data on particle collisions not only at record energy, but also in quantities never before achieved.
The experiments ATLAS s cms each expects to record more collisions during this new period than in the two previous operating periods combined, while the LHCbwhich was completely renewed during shutdown, expects the number of detected collisions to triple.
For your part, ALICEa detector specializing in the study of heavy ion collisions, hopes to multiply the total number of ion collisions detected by four or five thanks to a recent implementation of improvements.
This large number of collisions that are expected to be recorded will allow the international research community to study the Higgs’ Boson with great precision and present standard model from particle physics to the most rigorous tests to date.
During this new period of operation of the LHC, the start of two new experiments is also planned, PHASE s SND@LHCdesigned to research physics beyond the Standard Model.
On the other hand, the researchers have many other goals for this new Run 3, such as the study of proton-helium collisions to measure the frequency with which proton antimatter (antiprotons) is produced in these interactions or the analysis of collisions with oxygen ions, whose purpose is to improve knowledge about the physics of cosmic rays it’s from quark-gluon plasmaa state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang.