"A 16-mile ring-shaped tunnel near the Swiss-French border, the underground particle accelerator is designed to replicate the cosmos's extreme conditions shortly after the big bang by whipping up particles to near light speed, at which point physics begin s to become extremely weird and counterintuitive. In 2012, scientists used the LHC to discover the existence of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that, through incredibly esoteric quantum properties, is essentially responsible for giving all other particles their mass."
"Even something responsible for one of the most important scientific discoveries in history needs a facelift, however. Beginning in June, engineers will start upgrading the device so that it can carry out ten times the number of particle collisions it currently can do, something that will allow for far more experiments to be conducted, yielding still more troves of data."
""The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data," Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian. "There's going to be plenty to analy z e over the period. The physics results will keep on coming." The LHC will be offline during almost all of Thomson's term, which started on New Year's Day."
The Large Hadron Collider will be taken offline beginning in June for a major upgrade that will increase its collision rate roughly tenfold. The high-luminosity LHC upgrade will take about five years and will enable far more experiments and vastly larger data sets. The LHC accelerates particles around a 16-mile ring to near light speed to reproduce conditions just after the big bang and enabled the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. Engineers will perform extensive refurbishment while researchers analyze existing data collected during current runs. CERN leadership expects ongoing physics results to emerge during the shutdown period.
Read at Futurism
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