(Photo Credit: CERN)
The Large Hadron Collider is going back online, and Europe's colossal particle smasher is just about ready for some of its most audacious experiments yet.
Scientists at CERN will spend the next few months warming up the components, preparing for a set of experiments that will see the world's most powerful particle accelerator operating at twice the energy levels of its last set of experiments. It should be fully back online by March, ramping up to a full 13 TeV, which roughly translates to "a whole lot of energy." (It's 2.08282953 × 10-6 joules if you understand how much that is, which I don't.)
Why just incredible power? Now that the LHC has confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson, physicists plan to look for hints to the other big puzzles in the universe, such as the nature of dark energy, evidence of supersymmetry (heavy companion particles to commonly seen ones), the existence of other dimensions, and how mysterious antimatter interacts with itself. The latest experiments could confirm some theories and completely upend others. So get excited. The official countdown to March begins now, with a three-year run of experiments waiting in the wings.
Via Discovery.
