It’s been five years since physicists at CERN reported (in the understated manner typical of scientists) that they had observed a particle “consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.”
The discovery capped decades of theory and was an important triumph for the Large Hadron Collider[1], the means by which the elusive particle was found. But they didn’t close up shop and go home after that — the LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, is just getting up to speed.
You could be forgiven for thinking so, however. Shortly after the discovery of the Higgs, the LHC was shut down for two full years for a full servicing and upgrade. The extreme conditions created in the collider — think “big bang” extreme — were achieved at 8 teraelectronvolts, the unit of energy they use to gauge the power of the accelerated protons slamming into each other. You create greater forces snapping your fingers, but when you concentrate it into a space millions of times smaller, you can essentially puncture the fabric of reality.
8 TeV was already an immense increase over the next most powerful system — and the complex is now running at 13 TeV, with plans to go even higher.
“The design of the LHC was to reach 14 TeV, but the machine has been working very well, so everyone has the idea that we can push past that,” LHC physicist Arturo Sánchez Pineda told me.
Protons, accelerated to nearly the speed of light in the collider and smashed into each other (at those multi-TeV energy levels), produce all kinds of interesting effects because the forces and temperatures are so huge.
“The main problem five to seven years ago was looking for the Higgs boson, because...
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