CERN Got Ten Times More Powerful
CERN, the European physics research center, upgraded the Large Hadron Collider, increasing by ten times the amount of particles that can be collided together. This was achieved by upgrading the beans of protons smashing together, increasing the number of bosons created each year from 3 to 15 million.
Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN
This upgrade is just a small incremental step, but scientists are already putting together the plans for how the LHC 2.0 might look like. The current LHC's looping tunnel stretches for 27 kilometers (nearly 17 miles), while the new Future Circular Collider (FCC) might measure somewhere between 80 - 100 kilometers (50 - 62 miles). It will have double strength magnets, giving the researchers the ability to see new particles, potentially even heavier that the Higgs boson.
Smashing together high energy protons, is breaking the matter into its constituent parts, enabling the scientists to analyze the particles originated in the Big Bang.
Through this process of colling particles, scientists discovered top-quarks, bottom-quarks and charm-quarks, and the W & Z bosons. Most recently, the Higgs boson, which holds the secret of the origin of mass, was discovered at the LHC in 2012.
The configuration of such a complex system is not a trivial task, and the CERN scientists are using the power of distributed computing in order to run multiple simulations of the LHC collider, in a project called LHC@Home. The project is open to everyone running a BOINC client on their personal computers. Even more amazing, people donating computer power are able to claim Gridcoins, a cryptocurrency awarded in a Proof-of-Work process to people contributing to many other research projects.
Nice post! I actually did a summer of research at the LHC a few years ago. While everyone knows the energy of the colliding beams is indeed crucial, less well know is that luminosity is extremely important as well (luminosity is the number of particles in the beam). This is because particles are detected and their properties measured based on the statistical analysis of a huge number of collisions. More collisions = better measurements. Hence, this most recent upgrade is really key in advancing new physics.
@h202 your research at the LHC could be an interestng article for Steemit ;-)
It was a while ago, but good idea :)