LET鈥橲 get smashing. A new record was set last week by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland, when it collided two proton beams together at a total energy of 13 teraelectronvolts.
The collisions were part of ongoing efforts to restart LHC experiments after a two-year upgrade to the world鈥檚 biggest machine. They showed that the LHC can cope with energy levels almost twice those achieved during its previous run.
CERN engineers will continue to put the LHC through its paces, making sure everything is ready for the teams behind the various detectors to switch their experiments on. The official start of the LHC鈥檚 second run, when experiments get under way for real, is expected to happen in early June.
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Having found the Higgs boson in 2012, CERN researchers are hoping to learn more about it. They are also searching for signs of supersymmetry, a theory that suggests all members of the standard model of particle physics have a much heavier superpartner. Collisions at higher energies could reveal these partners and point the way to groundbreaking theories.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淟HC sees double鈥�
