Page 80 - How It Works - Book Of Amazing Answers To Curious Questions, Volume 05-15

What is the Large

Hadron Collider?

The upgrades and discoveries of the most powerful
particle smasher on the planet

he world’s most powerful particle
accelerator is back, and it’s better than
Tever. After being shut for two years of
planned repairs and maintenance, the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) is smashing particles
together at a record-breaking 13 tera-
electronvolts, almost double the energy it was
using in 2013.
Researchers at CERN hope this vastly
improved energy output will allow more
intricate studies of the Higgs boson – a particle
that could explain why matter has mass – which
was famously discovered in 2012. The increased
energy should mean that Higgs boson particles
are generated more frequently (it should be able
to generate ten times as many as during the

LHC’s first run), helping researchers measure
them more accurately and probe their rare
decays. Furthermore, researchers hope that a
more powerful LHC will be able to safely conduct
more extreme experiments, which scientists
believe will better simulate the conditions of the
early universe.
In July 2015, the LHC’s latest discovery was
made: the pentaquark. This not only represented
a brand new particle, but also gave researchers a
way to group together quarks (the constituent
particles of protons and neutrons) in a brand
new pattern. This in turn could help us
understand how these subatomic particles
are formed.
Physicists have also set their sights on fi nding
dark matter, which is known to make up around
85 per cent of all matter in the universe, but
whose nature is unknown. The only reason we
know it exists is due to its gravitational effects,
holding the universe together. Scientists have
theories about the characteristics of the particles
required for dark matter, but it may be that they
uncover something else entirely. This is what
makes the LHC experiments so exciting; no one

really knows what it will find between now and
2018, when the next set of upgrades have been
scheduled to occur.

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