CERN LHC Has Restarted And Recorded New Fundamental Observations
One month ago, the CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has restarted after a break of more than three years for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work.
Two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around LHC’s 27-kilometre ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV), marking the beginning of preparations for four years of physics-data taking, which is expected to start this summer.
Until then, LHC experts will work around the clock to progressively recommission the machine and safely ramp up the energy and intensity of the beams before delivering collisions to the experiments at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (13.6 TeV).
This third run of the LHC, called Run 3, will see the machine’s experiments collecting data from collisions not only at a record energy but also in unparalleled numbers.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments can each expect to receive more collisions during this physics run than in the two previous physics runs combined, while LHCb, which underwent a complete revamp during the shutdown, can hope to see its collision count increase by a factor of three.
Meanwhile, ALICE Experiment can expect a fifty times increase in the total number of recorded ion collisions, thanks to the recent completion of a major upgrade.
Read the full story on CERN Website.
ALICE Experiment
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a detector dedicated to heavy-ion physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms.
Last 18th May, ALICE makes first direct observation of a fundamental effect in particle physics, the dead-cone effect – a fundamental feature of the theory of the strong force that binds quarks and gluons together into protons, neutrons and, ultimately, all atomic nuclei.
In addition to confirming this effect, the observation provides direct experimental access to the mass of a single charm quark before it is confined inside hadrons.