Large Hadron Collider reignited with greater collision energy
It’s been nearly 10 years since the first particles smashed into each other at the world’s biggest scientific experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. Now, after a three-year break for upgrades, the facility is back in action since April 2022 for its third run. The particle accelerator is about to start smashing particles together at an unprecedented energy level. CERN – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research announced that the LHC will work to push the facility to record energy levels of 13.6 trillion electronvolts. This experiment will open gates for the elusive dark matter, and multiple dimensions and explore the concept of multiverses.
Recently, scientists at LHC have discovered three subatomic particles that were never seen before! They have observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquark”. This finding will lead scientists in understanding how quarks bind together into composite particles.
Let us travel back in time to understand the genesis of LHC.
What is a Large Hadron Collider?
A 27-Kilometer circular tunnel was built to study minuscule sub-atomic particles which are the smallest units of matter and could be understood as the backbone of all things. CERN took 10 years to build the powerful machine – between 1998 and 2008 with the collaboration with over 10,000 scientists from hundreds of universities and laboratories. Now, how does it work? Two proton beams are accelerated in opposite directions before they collide. When this collision happens, it allows physicists to study and understand the extreme limits of the physical world and understand phenomena that may never have been discovered before.
“God Particle” which made headlines, was one of the rare events that happened due to the collision of the particle and it helped to take physicists a little closer to the unknown world. But, along with it, many questions were also raised!
What is happening right now?
Run 3 is aimed at producing a new trove of data with the luminosity of the collider being revved up, increasing the chances of rarer events being witnessed by physicists. High energy beams and trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring more than 11,245 times a second since they travel at 99,999 per cent the speed of light. At the initial stage, the machine could engineer 600 million collisions every second. But this time, the proton beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns, to increase the rate of collisions. With the thinner beam, scientists are aiming at delivering 1.6 billion collisions per second.
Do you know the collision that occurred between the beams generates temperatures more than 1,00,000 times hotter than the hottest area of the sun! But it is worth mentioning that even with this humongous amount of heat generated, the machine’s accelerator ring will be kept at cool of minus 271.3 degrees celsius using superfluid helium.
How this experiment will be used?
One must think about why such an experiment is happening? Well, the simple answer is – to know above and beyond! It is pertinent to mention that the LHC experiment per year generates more than 30 petabytes of data. Putting this number in context – this is enough data to fill 1.2 million Blu-ray discs or 250 years of HD videos. The CERN’s DATA Centre has over 100 petabytes of this data permanently archived on tape.
It is just the Beginning!
LHC is undoubtedly the biggest and most complex machine in the world and it has given some of the most important scientific discoveries, including the Higgs Boson. But, apart from paving the path for discoveries in this field, CERN also has plans for a future machine that will dwarf the LHC and will be known as the Future Circular Collider.
The proposal for a 100-kilometre circumference Future Circular Collider was released in 2018 by CERN. Compared to the 13.6 trillion electronvolts energy level of LHC, the Future Circular Collider will work at energy levels of up to 100
Firefox Browser Logo Firefox browser has many features which makes it unique. It is one of major (widely recognised) alternatives to the Chromium based browsers in the market. The browser has many good and bad features and the decisions of its parent organisation's management who claim to be privacy friendly and not for profit, is often questionable. One of the unique features of the browser is its advanced settings, found by typing "about:config". As of 2025, this can be accessed on any version of firefox on desktop but on android, it is only found in the Beta and Nightly versions. To access this secret menu on regular Firefox on Android , type in search bar "chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml" Often people find it difficult to understand what these settings do because there is no official list of these and all information related to the settings are scattered in the web. So, here are some important settings with their descriptions. Please note , some of t...
Comments
Post a Comment