Yesterday, the scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, restarted the world’s largest and most powerful machine – the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider was shut down for two years for maintenance. This time, the scientists at LHC aim at studying the dark matter, antimatter and gravity to solve the mysteries of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider is world’s largest machine and is about 17 mile (27 km) long. About two years ago, the LHC made a distinguishing contribution to the science with discovery of Higgs Boson’s existence and was shut of upgrade and maintenance. Now this beast is once again ready to create scientific history. The LHC generates about 600 million particles per second with a beam that circulates for about 10 hours and travels about 6 billion miles. Traveling at the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider, a proton makes 11,245 rounds per second.
CERN Director Rolf Heuer said on the website:
“Operating accelerators for the benefit of the physics community is what CERN’s here for. Today, CERN’s heart beats once more to the rhythm of the LHC.”
Is the Large Hadron Collider now more powerful?
Earlier the highest power reached was eight tetraelectonvolts (TeV) in 2012. After the upgradation, the LHC has become more powerful with a maximum power of 13-14 TeV.
CERN told that if everything goes as planned, the LHC will achieve the 13 TeV power till June.
What is LHC’s second phase’s significance?
Scientists working at LHC say that their biggest fear is what if LHC’s biggest discovery remains the Higgs Boson and it discovers nothing else ever its next 20 years run. However, yesterday was a joyous day for the scientists and CERN Director Rolf Heuer said, “Now the hard work starts.”
The purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to recreate the conditions at the very beginning after the Big Bang to study the mysteries covering the answers. With LHC, scientists aim to find the dark matter and dark energy. It’s a well-known fact that visible matter constitutes just 4 percent of the universe. We are yet to know that why some particles are heavy while some don’t have any mass at all. With LHC, over its future run, scientists hope to discover the unknown- the unified answer to all the forces including gravity.
CMS releases first high-level LHC open data: https://t.co/7T79pkIPax #cernopendata For press: https://t.co/mklU4a110l pic.twitter.com/OqJegkUQvl
— CMS Experiment CERN (@CMSexperiment) November 20, 2014
During this new phase, the Large Hadron Collider will be exploring New Physics, which deals with the dark matter and antimatter.
The LHC is world’s largest Physics experiment and more than 10,000 are directly and indirectly involved in it.
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