The world’s largest physics experiment is back in service: the LHC particle accelerator near Geneva is being relaunched. It was closed for three years for improvement, and here it is again: on April 22, CERN’s biggest collision, the biggest in the world. It is in the testing phase until summer. He would then spend four years exploring the secrets of the subject.
The ring will break the particles against each other and break them and find new ones. It’s not very high technology, so to speak, but that’s what happens at LHC. This ring is a large 27 km long ring buried 100 meters underground on the Franco-Swiss border. Inside, physicists push protons and particles located in the nucleus of atoms. Two proton beams rotate in a ring, each in one direction: they collide: protons explode and form new particles.
This is how physicists have been exploring matter since the 1950s. The last discovered particle arose precisely on CERN in 2012, the only particle missing was the famous Higgs boson.
So what is the LHC looking for now? Goes in search of the unknown. Because physicists know that their 17-part model, even if complete, is not the end of the story. First, it does not involve the force of gravity: it does not talk about the force that holds our feet on the ground. Yet it must also play a role at the particle level. There are many more mysteries and other questions … especially in the dark sense: we look at space and suspect whose existence it is: the stars in the galaxy rotate so fast that it claims to be a mass, a particle. But we can not see. So the LHC will monitor it
To do this, it requires more power, so work was carried out over three years to increase the power of the proton beam. That’s it, the energy record had already been broken, Monday, three days after the accelerator was restarted. A world record, CERN was greeted with applause in the control room. Now we have to wait a few weeks for the conflicts to start.