The Large Hadron Collider (commonly known as LHC), the flagship experiment of the European Center for Particle Physics (LHC), restarted this Friday after three years of being shut down for maintenance, consolidation and modernization work, the institution reported. scientific.
At 10:26 GMT today, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions through the particle accelerator – a large 27-kilometer ring-shaped tube located about 80 meters below ground – with an energy injection of 450,000 million electrovolts (450 GeV).
“These beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after hard work during the shutdown period,” Rhodri Jones, head of CERN’s Beams Department, said in a statement.
In this first phase, the energy is still at an “injection” power and the number of circulating protons is limited, but both will gradually increase to high-energy, high-intensity collisions within a couple of months, he added. scientific.
Once it is clear that all the systems work perfectly, the energy will increase until it reaches the record of 13.6 billion electrovolts (13.6 TeV).
The work that has been carried out on the accelerator will allow it to operate at a higher energy, which in turn will mean obtaining more data and statistics in the next four years of operation of the LHC.
This will mean that the ATLAS and CMS detectors, which is where the data is collected and analyzed, will receive more collisions in this third phase of the accelerator’s operation than in the two previous phases combined.
Another detector, the LHCb, will see its collision count triple, while the specialized ALICE detector (dedicated to studying heavy ion collisions) will receive 50 times more collision data. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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