It’s always hard to top a blockbuster first season that left off with a killer surprise ending, but the team at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hopes season two will be even wilder than the first.
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator wrapped up its first season (what CERN calls the period when the LHC is active) in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson—the “God” particle that helps explain how particles gain mass—and it may seem hard to top that. But after taking some time to do a complete overhaul of the LHC, CERN is set to fire it back up this year for another three-year season, running at nearly double the energy it had in its first season. They’ve also replaced many of the high-powered magnets that drive the accelerator, have reinforced all 10,000 electrical connections, and will be using narrower beams.
These improvements will not only allow the researchers to gain more insight on the Higgs boson (and possibly find other, similar particles) but it will also help them in their quest for answers to some even bigger questions about the universe, like what the hell dark matter is.
“What is the dark matter we see out there in the universe?” asked David Charlton, the scientific lead on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, during a press conference this morning. “We know it has to be there, can we create it and study it in the laboratory?” Continue reading
