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The LHC is Preparing to Restart at Double Power
The world’s most complicated machine, one that deepened our understanding of matter and the universe. Then it was turned off. Now, it’s been beefed up, remodeled and upgraded.
Since 2013, what’s probably the world’s most complex machine has been given a significant upgrade. And after the relaunch, it is scheduled to have a potential energy of 13 Terraelectron-Volts (TeV). So far its record energy generation was 8 TeV.
Initially, the engineers wanted to go as high as 14 TeV, but eventually decided to limit themselves – also to reduce the probability of technical defects and failures. “At 13 TeV, the facility will be much more reliable and stable,” Andrey Golutvin says. The professor for particle physics is working on one of the four huge detectors, called LHCb. This detector is dedicated to the discovery of asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Unknown Consequences
A top scientist at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or “unknown unknowns” – for instance “an extra dimension”.
“Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,” said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ.
The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons – typically either protons or lead ions.
