Collider

The world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is back in action after a three year break for maintenance and an upgrade with more energy, higher intensity beams and greater precision. The LHC at CERN, outside of Geneva, is set to run 24/7 for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts. The upgrades should give LHC tools greater precision and allow for more particle collisions, brighter light and more discovery about particles in quantum field theory. CERN used the LHC to…

The residents of Nagla Tulai, a farming village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, have always had to endure hot summers, but the past few years of punishingly cruel heat have tested their strength. This May it hit 49°C (120°F), the highest India has recorded in 122 years. Since then, local news reports have attributed more than 50 deaths to the record-breaking heat.At the end of April, when the daytime temperature crossed 45°C (113°F), most residents of Nagla Tulai sought succor in the winds blowing outdoors.…

The new pentaquark, illustrated here as a pair of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure, is made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. Credit: CERNThree never-before-seen particles have been observed by the international Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery includes a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks,” which includes a new type of tetraquark.The findings, presented…

Ten years after it discovered the Higgs Boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.The world's largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run.From Tuesday, it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research…

Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.  The world's largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From Tuesday it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear…

A recent series of precise measurements of already known, standard particles and processes have threatened to shake up physics.As a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>CERN</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest…

After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists announced Thursday that a fundamental particle – the W boson – has a significantly greater mass than theorized, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the Universe works.  Those foundations are grounded by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the Universe, and what forces govern them.The W boson governs what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental…

The world's largest particle collider is getting ready to smash atoms harder than ever before.Following a three-year break of scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and pandemic delays, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is preparing to power up for its third, and most powerful yet, experimental period.  If all initial tests and checks starting this month go well, scientists will begin experiments in June and slowly ramp up to full power by the end of July, experts told Live Science.The new run could finally reveal the…

Europe's Large Hadron Collider has started up its proton beams again at unprecedented energy levels after going through a three-year shutdown for maintenance and upgrades.It only took a couple of days of tweaking for the pilot streams of protons to reach a record energy level of 6.8 tera electronvolts, or TeV. That exceeds the previous record of 6.5 TeV, which was set by the LHC in 2015 at the start of the particle collider's second run.  The new level comes "very close to the design energy of the LHC, which is 7 TeV",…

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built, is ready to go back into service after a three-year overhaul and refit. On April 22, 2022 at 12:16 pm CEST, two proton beams with an injection energy of 450 GeV were sent in opposite directions around the the 27-kilometer-long (17-mile) ring.The advantage of a giant atom smasher like the LHC is that the tremendous energies it can impart on subatomic particles can cause them to strike each other so hard that they break apart in…