Large Hadron Collider gets a boost
A revamp of the Large Hadron Collider will shine a brighter light on physics mysteries, reports
Tom Miles, of Reuters.
EUROPE’S physics research centre, Cern, launched an upgrade of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 10 days ago, six years after the huge particle accelerator solved an enduring riddle by confirming the existence of the elusive Higgs boson.
Staff said the overhaul would boost the ‘‘luminosity’’ of protonsmashing experiments at the LHC, a 27km ring under the SwissFrench border, increasing the number of particle collisions tenfold and producing a clearer picture of the subatomic world.
‘‘This will allow us to address new questions, the outstanding questions in fundamental physics, with more opportunity to find answers,’’ Cern directorgeneral Fabiola Gianotti told Reuters at the opening ceremony.
The decadelong upgrade, involving a materials budget of 950 million Swiss francs ($NZ1.37 billion), would allow the LHC to churn out more data about particle collisions every year than it had since its working life began in 2010, experts there said.
The upgrade will focus the beams of the protons that are smashed together — increasing luminosity — meaning more collisions and more chance of spotting something unusual.
Last year, the LHC produced about 3 million Higgs bosons, the longsought particle which, along with an associated forcefield, provided the answer to the question: where does matter get its mass from?
After the upgrade, Cern said the LHC would be producing at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year, allowing physicists to get better acquainted with one of their most recent discoveries.
They would also be seeking other particles, and looking for answers about antimatter and the Big Bang at the start of the universe.
Gianotti said her hope was that the upgrade — akin to replacing your dingy 60W bedside lamp with an industrial floodlight — would provide answers about ‘‘dark matter’’, which had never been seen but was known to exist because of its effect on the visible material around it.
‘‘For me, personally, solving the mystery of the dark matter of the universe would be something great,’’ she said.
‘‘Of course, it would be fantastic to produce the dark matter particle in the collision of LHC beams.’’
The value of the discoveries cannot be predicted, but it is expected to provide a boost to science and technology in the future, potentially speeding up manufacturing processes or improving computing power.
Even the technologies needed to upgrade the LHC would break new ground, because focusing the proton beams that were smashed together would require new superconducting magnets and electronics that had never been developed before, with potential spinoff benefits for society, Gianotti said.