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Ready, steady, go: the race to discover new physics returns today as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reignites, firing heavy ion particles at each other at 99.99% of the speed of light to recreate a state of primordial matter we haven’t seen since live After the Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider It is the world’s longest and most powerful particle accelerator, shooting beams of subatomic particles around a 17-mile (27 kilometer) underground ring near Geneva, on the Franco-Swiss border. Since the LHC originally came online in 2010, its experiments have produced 3,000 scientific papers, with a range of results including the most well-known one: the discovery of Higgs boson.
“It’s really true to say we’re making discoveries on a weekly basis,” Chris Parks, a spokesperson for the LHCb trial, said at a press conference at the end of June.
Related: 10 years after discovering the Higgs boson, physicists still can’t get enough of the ‘God particle’
new technology
The particle accelerator has spent the past three and a half years receiving biotechnological upgrades that will enable it to smash beams of particles with record-breaking energy. 6.8 trillion electron volts (TeV) in the collisions that would total an unprecedented 13.6 TeV. That’s 4.6% higher than where I left off in October 2018.
Increasing the rate of particle collisions, improving the ability to collect more data than ever before, and entirely new experiments will pave the way for researchers to conduct science beyond the Higgs boson, perhaps even beyond the current. Standard Form Particle physics.
In 2020, a new device, the Linear Accelerator (Linac) 4, will be installed at the Large Hadron Collider. Instead of injecting protons into the system as before, Linac 4 will boost negatively charged hydrogen ions, which are two accompanied protons Electrons. As the ions move through Linac 4, the electrons are stripped away to leave only the protons, and the entanglement of these ions allows the formation of tighter groups of protons. This results in narrower beams of protons being fired through the collider, increasing the rate of collisions.
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Perhaps the most important technological update, however, is the system that launches experiments at the LHC to begin collecting data.
Since scientific research is now in the age of big data, how to distinguish which data is worth recording and analyzing becomes an even bigger problem. “We have 14 million light transit points per second,” Parks said. Each beam intersection sees beams of particles colliding with each other.
Previously, picking out useful information from all those collisions was left to conventional instrumentation and the intuition of human researchers, resulting in only 10% of collisions being recorded inside the LHC. The new operating system uses machine learning to analyze a situation more quickly and is more efficient in terms of what data to collect for later analysis. This upgrade, for example, will see LHCb triple the sampling rate, while the ALICE (Large Ion Collider Experiment) instrument will increase the number of recorded events by a factor of 50.
“This is clearly a big deal,” ALICE spokesman Luciano Musa said at the press conference.
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new experiences
While there is still work to be done to learn about the Higgs boson, the LHC is equipped to do more besides that.
“We have this ambition to put the Higgs boson in a broader context, and that simply cannot be summed up in one or two questions,” Gian Guedes, head of the theoretical physics department at CERN, said during the press conference. “So we have a very broad program that addresses many questions in particle physics.”
Two new detectors were installed during the recent shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider, the FASER, the Advanced Search Experiment, and the SND, the scattering and neutrino detector. FASER will search for light and weakly interacting particles, including neutrinos and possible dark matterwhile SND will focus exclusively on neutrinos.
Neutrinos are elusive ghost-like particles that barely interact with anything else around them – a streak of lead Light year Thick will only stop half of the neutrinos passing through it – trillions of them pass through your body harmlessly every second. Given this, and although scientists know that collisions inside the LHC should regularly produce neutrinos, no neutrinos generated in the particle accelerator have been detected (the neutrinos observed by previous neutrino detectors mostly come from the sun). However, this is set to change, as FASER and SND are expected to detect approximately 7,000 neutrino events between them over the next four years.
On the face of it, FASER and SND do not look like neutrino detectors. These tend to be huge, like the stainless steel tank of the Super Kamiokande reagent in Japan containing 50,000 metric tons of purified water, or Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory In Antarctica, where there are sensors placed in 0.6 cubic miles (one cubic kilometer) of ice below the surface. Instead, the FASER is only 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, while the SND is slightly larger at 8 feet (2.4 meters). Rather than having huge amounts of liquid or ice, it features simple tungsten detectors and emulsion films, not unlike old photographic films.
FASER and SND can get away with being too small because “the LHC produces a lot of neutrinos, so you need less mass in the detector to make some of them interact, and the neutrinos produced in LHC collisions are very high,” FASER spokesperson Jamie Boyd told Space.com. The energy, the interaction probability goes up with the energy.
FASER is located 1,500 feet (480 meters) away Downstream of the Atlas experience, in the deserted tunnels that were once part of the predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider, the Large Electron-Positron Collider. The FASER and SND experiments are complementary – FASER is beamline noise, while SND is angled. In this way, they are able to detect neutrinos of different energies coming from different particle collisions. Most neutrinos will go unnoticed by the two experiments, but a small number will interact with atoms in the dense tungsten layers, causing the neutrinos to decay and produce daughter particles that leave traces in the emulsion called peaks that indicate the position of the interaction. The emulsion layer is removed every three or four months and sent to a laboratory in Japan for examination. Already, a small prototype has been discovered Neutrino candidatesbut the prototype was too small to confirm the measurements.
“The main result we’re looking for is what we call the cross-section,” Boyd said. “This describes how, as a function of their energy, the three types of neutrinos–electron, muon, and tau neutrinos–interact.”
These different types, or “flavors,” of neutrinos are able to oscillate with each other as they travel over great distances. For example, a neutrino may start out as a muon neutrino before oscillating into an electron neutrino. At the LHC, the distance between the neutrino detectors and the source of the collisions at the LHC is so small that no oscillations can be expected unless a new particle is involved.
“If we see more electron neutrinos and fewer muon neutrinos than we expect, this could indicate the presence of an additional type of neutrino, called sterile neutrinoThis causes these oscillations to occur, Boyd said. “For now, sterile neutrinos remain hypothetical, and finding evidence for them would be a huge discovery.
new theories
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Speaking of the discoveries, while the LHC has been shut down due to its latest upgrade, analysis of data from the old Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in the US that shut down in 2011 has revealed a tantalizing hint of physics operating outside the Standard Model. Specifically, Tevatron found evidence that the W boson particle, which is involved in mediating the weak force governing radioactivity, could be larger than the Standard Model predicts. Meanwhile, there were strange readings from the LHC and Tevatron of the behavior of electrons and muon This, if true, could challenge predictions of the Standard Model. The onus is now on the LHC to conduct further investigation.
However, scientists at the LHC are not ready to jump to conclusions about this or any other inconsistency of the Standard Model. Instead, they prefer to remain neutral when it comes to differing theories about what the LHC is observing, to avoid biasing the results.
“We’re not chasing the theory,” CERN director general Fabiola Gianotti said at the press conference. “I think our goal is to understand how nature works at the most basic level. Our goal is not to search for particular theories.”
Chris Parks is optimistic that the LHC can get to the bottom of these discrepancies, one way or another. “We very much expect that with the new data that we’re collecting, we can really check these interesting hints that we have, and see if they show any violations of the Standard Model,” he said.
There is no rush. After this new four-year monitoring run by the LHC, there will be another shutdown of further upgrades that will lead to what is referred to as the High Luminosity LHC. This work will begin around 2029, and annually detect more than 15 million Higgs bosons with collision energies of 14 terabytes. Away from the LHC, plans are afoot for an entirely new accelerator at CERN called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), which will be powerful enough to reach energies of 100 TeV when it starts operating around 2040. The FCC will be much larger than the LHC, With a 62-mile (100-kilometre) tunnel, though, the concept has sparked controversy recently with some physicists claiming that its potential $100 billion price tag would not be worth the benefits of its construction and that the money could be spent more wisely on smaller, more focused projects.
That’s all for the future. At present, the Large Hadron Collider still has the Higgs bosons to make, neutrinos to discover, new particles to find and theories to test. What new discoveries will we talk about in four years?
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