As of Wednesday, the 3rd of June 2015, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility has begun producing data for the first time in almost two years. The world’s largest particle accelerator has been going under maintenance and upgrades that will help scientists study fundamental particles, the building block of matter and the forces controlling them. The Large Hadron Collider started producing stable beams which are necessary to run their experiments; resulting is an excited buzz at the facility which is located on the French/Swiss border, as they have made leaps and bounds during it’s last run from 2010-2013.
The LHC is now running at almost twice the power it was running during its 2010-2013 run. This increase from 8 TeraelectronVolts (TeV) to 13 TeV, scientists are hoping, will help them find evidence of “new physics” and will help to investigate the theory of “supersymmetry”. During the Large Hadron Collider’s last run the Higgs Boson particle was discovered, which was theorized about back in 1964 and landed those two scientists a Nobel Prize in 2013. The Higgs Boson is the elementary particle that gives particles mass and explains how they interact with each other, however it falls short of explaining gravity and dark matter, along with other limitations.
This is being hailed as a new era in physics by the scientists at CERN;
“The collisions we are seeing today indicate that the work we have done in the past two years to prepare and improve our detector has been successful and marks the beginning of a new era of exploration of the secrets of nature,” – Tiziano Camporesi