Posted on 12/03/2018 11:28:30 AM PST by ETL
Scientists will use the break in operations to beef up the accelerator’s energy.
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet. Particles took their last spin around the Large Hadron Collider on December 3 before scientists shut the machine down for two years of upgrades.
Located at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, the accelerator has smashed together approximately 16 million billion protons since 2015, when it reached its current energy of 13 trillion electron volts. Planned improvements before the machine restarts in 2021 will bring the energy up to 14 trillion electron volts — the energy it was originally designed to reach.
During a round of lower-energy collisions between 2009 and 2013, researchers found the elusive Higgs boson, filling in the last missing piece of the standard model of particle physics (SN: 7/28/12, p. 5).
The planned adjustments to the machine will also lay the groundwork for another incarnation of the collider further in the future, known as the High-Luminosity LHC (SN Online: 6/15/18). That upgrade, expected to be ready by 2026, will increase the rate of proton smashups by at least a factor of five.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Amen!
Good! Every time they switch that thing on they have to cut down half the Amazon rain forest printing new science books with updated information.
Maybe they just kept adding on. That could use another wheelie thing on the right..
When they dump the beam, they deposit enough energy within a block of graphite to create molten carbon. Molten carbon requires the pressure found at great depth within the Earth to exist in that liquid state.
We had a great supercollider planned in Texas but the troglodytes shut it down.
It would’ve been magnificent.
Ed
And it started out as an 8 year old's erector set...........
Did we go to the moon?
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