The Large Hadron Collider Is Being Shut Down
The Large Hadron Collider will be shut down – not permanently, but for a fairly long period – and the eventual retirement of the famous atom smasher is also something top scientists are currently considering.
The underground particle accelerator, a 16-mile-long ring-shaped tunnel near the Swiss-French border, is designed to replicate the extreme conditions of the cosmos shortly after the big bang by accelerating particles to near the speed of light; This is where physics beginsS. becoming extremely strange and irrational. In 2012, scientists used the LHC to discover the existence of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle: thanks to incredibly esoteric quantum propertiesIt is essentially responsible for giving all other particles their mass.
But even something responsible for one of history’s most important scientific discoveries needs a makeover. Starting in June, engineers will begin upgrading the device so that it can perform ten times more particle collisions than it currently can; This will allow for many more experiments and yield more data. The project called high brightness LHCIt will take around five years to complete, and while it will definitely be worth it in the long run, this means a huge amount of downtime.
Rest assured that the LHC will not go dark without leaving physicists with a lot of homework to complete before returning, according to Mark Thomson, the new director general of CERN, the physics laboratory and intergovernmental organization that oversees the particle accelerator.
“The machine works perfectly and we are recording a huge amount of data,” said Thomson, professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge. said Guard. “There will be a lot to analyzeze throughout the period. “Physics results will continue to come.”
The LHC will be offline for nearly the entirety of Thomson’s tenure, starting on New Year’s Day. In fact, CERN does not expect the high-luminosity LHC to be operational again until mid-2030. Although Thomson appears to be taking the reins at a less exciting time in the device’s history, he says he’s excited to make a change to the device.
“This is an incredibly exciting project,” Thomson told the newspaper. “It’s more interesting than sitting here with the machine working.”
Thomson is also responsible for CERN’s planning for the LHC’s successor. Leading candidate to replace him GuardThe proposed 56-mile-long Circumference Future Circular Collider is a gigantic Hadron that would make it look like a kiddie pool. The first stage, designed to combine electrons and positrons (the latter being the anti-matter counterpart of the former), will be built in the late 2040s, and will be replaced by another stage in the 2070s to accelerate protons to even higher speeds.
The fate of the FCC is far from certain. Its cost, planned to be approximately 19 billion dollars, is too much for CERN to pay alone. GuardThere are also questions about whether giant particle accelerators represent the best way to investigate some of the biggest questions in science, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
But Thomson still believes in the great atom smasher.
“We haven’t gotten to the point where we stop doing discovery and the FCC is the natural progression. Our goal is to understand the universe at its most fundamental level,” he said. Guard. “And this is definitely not the time to give up.”
More about physics: Giant Chinese Sphere Detects “Ghost Particles” While Buried Under Mountain
