![]() While physicists want to use the upgraded accelerator to probe the rules of the Standard Model and learn more about the Higgs boson, upgrades to the LHC's four main detectors also leave it well positioned to search for physics beyond what is already known. This is because the model, despite being the most comprehensive and accurate one so far, has enormous gaps, making it totally incapable of explaining where the force of gravity comes from, what dark matter is made up of, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. Though the model has been around in its final form since the mid-1970s, physicists are far from satisfied with it and are constantly looking for new ways to test it and, if they're lucky, discover new physics that will make it fail. One of the LHC's goals is to further scrutinize the Standard Model, the mathematical framework physicists use to describe all of the known fundamental particles in the universe and the forces through which they interact. Atom smashers like the LHC detect possible new particles by looking for telltale decay products, as the heavier particles are generally short-lived and immediately break down into lighter particles. And the more energy they have, the more massive the particles they can produce by smashing together. The faster those protons go, the more energy they have. ![]() The result? New and sometimes exotic particles are formed. Inside the LHC's 17-mile-long underground ring, protons zip around at near light-speed before slamming into each other. "We will measure the strengths of the Higgs boson interactions with matter and force particles to unprecedented precision, and we will further our searches for Higgs boson decays to dark matter particles as well as searches for additional Higgs bosons," Andreas Hoecker, a spokesperson of the LHCs ATLAS collaboration, an international project that includes physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff, said in a statement. During the two previous stints, running from 2009 to 20 to 2018, the atom smasher shored up physicists' understanding of how the basic building blocks of matter interact - called the Standard Model - and led to the discovery of the long-predicted Higgs boson, the elusive particle which gives all matter its mass. The upgrades to the accelerator's particle beams have done more than spike their energy range an increased level of compactness, making the beams denser with particles, will increase the probability of a collision so much that the accelerator is expected to capture more particle interactions in its third run than it did in its previous two combined. ![]() With these fixes completed, scientists want to use the gigantic accelerator to smash protons together at record-breaking energies of up to 13.6 trillion electron volts (TeV) - an energy level that should up the odds of the accelerator producing particles not yet observed by science. Located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, the nearly 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) loop was fired up today after spending four years offline for upgrades. ![]() ![]() The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. ![]()
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