The restart of the Large Hadron Collider is happening now! Here’s the live blog from CERN: http://run2firstbeam.web.cern.ch/
High energy protons last traversed the 27km tunnel on the outskirts of Geneva at the end of 2012.
The first run of the LHC (2009-2012) extended our knowledge of physics up above the energy scale where the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces unify, and led to the discovery of the Higgs boson (and the Nobel prize on 2013 for Francois Englert and Peter Higgs).
Run one saw collisions at energies up to 8 Tera-electronvolts (TeV), the beams having an energy of 4 TeV each. That is the equivalent of accelerating them through 4000, 000, 000, 000 Volts.
With more collisions, we can study the Higgs boson, and the other things we already know about, more closely.
But importantly, the aim in Run 2 is to go at first to 13 TeV, then hopefully to 14 TeV (7 TeV per beam).
Every time we go up in energy, we gain resolution. We are turning up the power of the greatest microscope ever built, to study what we are made of on the smallest scales. People have different favourite possibilties of what might show up: Dark Matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry... We don’t really know. It is an exploration.
The beams haven’t yet been brought into collision, that still to come. But as of this morning, the LHC is a working accelerator again after two years of refurbishment and maintenance.
The adventure continues...
http://run2firstbeam.web.cern.ch/
Jon Butterworth has written a book about being involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, Smashing Physics, available here, and in North America as “Most Wanted Particle”. Some interesting events where you might be able to hear him talk about it etc are listed here. Also, Twitter.
