Get ready to look at the universe through a new window.
Later this month, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the behemoth particle accelerator operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), will be back in action after a two-year hiatus.
The pause was intentional, giving technicians and engineers time to ramp up the collision energy by almost a factor of two. In particle collisions, the higher the energy, the bigger the payoff, as the energy of the colliding particles gets translated into the masses of the debris, following the E=mc2 prescription.
As particles collide, their energy morphs into a shower of new particles that come flying off from the collision point. To see this, physicists use highly sophisticated detectors, essentially modern versions of ultrasensitive microscopes that can track each individual particle produced during the collision. The process is very complex, as there are literally trillions of collisions to sift through — most of them created by well-known events of little interest for new science.
Physicists, though, are nervously awaiting the unleashing of the bolder LHC; the payoff could be huge, leading, for example, to the discovery of the so-called supersymmetric particles that could possibly solve the mystery of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is a strange material that attracts normal matter gravitationally, but doesn't emit any kind of radiation. And, if you are an optimist, you are waiting to hear whether the "new" LHC can find evidence of extra spatial dimensions called for by theories that attempt to unify all forces of nature.
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