Today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is reactivated, launching heavy ion particles into one another at 99.99% the speed of light to recreate a state of primeval matter not seen since just after the Big Bang, reigniting the quest to uncover new physics.
At a press briefing at the end of June, Chris Parkes, a representative for the LHCb experiment, remarked, "It's really true to say that we have been making discoveries on a weekly basis."
The largest and most potent particle accelerator in existence, the Large Hadron Collider sends subatomic particle beams around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) loop underground in the area of Geneva, close to the French-Swiss border. The 3,000 scientific articles that the LHC's experiments have generated since it first started operating in 2010 contain a variety of findings.
Researchers will be able to undertake studies beyond the Higgs boson and, possibly, even above the current Standard Model of particle physics thanks to an increased rate of particle collisions, better capacity to gather more data than ever before, and brand-new experiments.
The particle accelerator has spent the last three and a half years undergoing crucial technological enhancements that will allow it to smash particle beams with record energy of 6.8 trillion electronvolts (TeV) in collisions that will total an unheard-of 13.6 TeV. This has increased by 4.6% from where it was in October 2018.
A brand-new component, the Linear Accelerator (Linac) 4, was added to the LHC in 2020. Linac 4 will boost negatively charged hydrogen ions, which are protons accompanied by two electrons, as opposed to injecting protons into the system as it did before. Intermixing these ions enables tighter bunches of protons to develop as the electrons are taken away from the ions as they go through Linac 4. As a result, the protons that are shot through the collider in smaller beams clash more frequently.
The system that prompts the LHC experiments to start collecting data, however, may be the most significant technological advancement.
In the past, just 10% of collisions inside the LHC were recorded since extracting relevant information from all those collisions was left to traditional hardware and the judgment of human researchers.
The new trigger system makes better use of machine learning to analyze the situation more rapidly and decide what information to gather for further study. For instance, the LHCb will triple its sampling rate as a result of this improvement, and the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) instrument will capture 50 times as many events.
