Getting the equipment up to speed in this upgrade is a process that CERN calls "magnet training" and which is made up of about 12,000 individual tests. To increase the energy of the proton beams to such an extreme level, "the thousands of superconducting magnets, whose fields direct the beams around their trajectory, need to grow accustomed to much stronger currents after a long period of inactivity during LS2," the same CERN statement read. At the time of the previous shutdown in 2018, the collider could accelerate beams up to an energy of 6.5 teraelectronvolts, and that value has been raised to 6.8 teraelectronvolts, according to a statement from CERN.įor reference, a single teraelectronvolt is equivalent to 1 trillion electron volts (an electron volt, a unit of energy, is equivalent to the work done on an electron accelerating through the potential of one volt.) With the new upgrades, CERN has increased the power of the LHC's injectors, which feed beams of accelerated particles into the collider. However, "it's certainly very intriguing," and "would be a major, major discovery if confirmed." There's quite a significant difference," Ellis said.Įllis specified that there is still much work to be done before these findings are confirmed as a concrete discovery. However, findings like those during the LHCb experiment, which investigates the differences between matter and antimatter, "indicate that they actually don't behave in the same way. "One thing, which by the way, it did come out during the shutdown period, which certainly intrigues me, is this evidence that when bottom quarks decay, they may do so in a way that discriminates between electrons and muons," Ellis said, adding that within the standard model "we expect electrons and muons to behave in exactly the same way." And the best place to look to test those predictions is usually in the highest energies achievable," Allport added.Įllis is especially interested in exploring one particular finding that actually came during the LHC shutdown, he shared. When physicists explore unknowns like dark matter and dark energy, "these things require extensions to the standard model of particle physics to accommodate, and all of those theories make predictions. These high-energy collisions could also allow researchers to think outside of the box with their experiments and try to make sense of things that the standard model doesn't fully explain. "These measurements shed light on what's happening at the highest energies that we can reach, which tells us about phenomena in the very early universe," Phil Allport, a particle physics detector expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK, told NewScientist (opens in new tab) about what experiments with the LHC could allow scientists to do. Such a collider would not be built for achieving specific goals, however, as has been the case with other colliders in the past-instead, it would be used to conduct experiments meant to test various theories that seek to explain the nature of the universe.However, the LHC will soon be back doing what it does best: accelerating protons (or ions) to near the speed of light and smashing them into one another. The project also calls for a second stage that would entail dismantling the collider at some distant time and building a proton-proton collider in its place. Also, research efforts would have to be developed and launched to design and build the hardware needed for the project. Once that happens, the funds for the project would have to be made available by participating countries in Europe and the U.K.-and this time, perhaps, from other countries such as the U.S., China or Japan. If the feasibility study and financial estimates work out as hoped, the next step would be actual approval for the project to move forward. The next step will involve figuring out where to dig the new tunnel and whether it will be possible to do so in the area near the LHC. The approval by the CERN council was not an official go-ahead for the project-it was a go-ahead to look into its feasibility.
Initial estimates suggest it would cost approximately €21 billion. The plan calls for first building a collider by 2040 that would smash electrons into their antimatter partners, called positrons, allowing for closer study of the Higgs and possibly dark matter. Several ideas have been put forth, but they are now all moot except for the 100-kilometer plan-it calls for building the collider around the city of Geneva, intersecting the LHC at two points. Even as the team at CERN was reporting evidence of the Higgs boson, back in 2012, plans for a new, larger super collider were being proposed.
0 kommentar(er)
