World’s most powerful particle accelerator now operating at record energy

On 5 July 2022, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator located just outside Geneva started operating at new higher record energy levels.

After more than three years of upgrade and maintenance work the LHC is back online. Beams of particles have been circulating in CERN’s accelerator complex since April, with the LHC machine and its injectors being recommissioned to operate with new higher-intensity beams and increased energy. But now, the LHC the is ready to operate with “stable beams”, something that allows experiments to switch on all their subsystems and begin taking the data that will be used for physics analysis.

The LHC will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV), providing greater precision and discovery potential than ever before, said CERN.

“We will be focusing the proton beams at the interaction points to less than 10 micron beam size, to increase the collision rate. Compared to Run 1, in which the Higgs was discovered with 12 inverse femtobarns, we will be delivering 280 inverse femtobarns (23 times more). This is a significant increase, paving the way for new discoveries,” said Mike Lamont, Director for Accelerators and Technology.

The four big LHC experiments have performed major upgrades to their data readout and selection systems, with new detector systems and computing infrastructure. The changes will allow them to collect significantly larger data samples, with data of higher quality than in previous runs. The detectors expect to record more collisions during this run (Run 3) than in the two previous runs combined.

The LHCb experiment underwent a complete revamp and looks to increase its data taking rate by a factor of ten, while ALICE is aiming at a staggering fifty-fold increase in the number of recorded collisions. With the increased data samples and higher collision energy, Run 3 will further expand the already very diverse LHC physics programme. Scientists at the experiments will probe the nature of the Higgs boson with unprecedented precision and in new channels. They may observe previously inaccessible processes, and will be able to improve the measurement precision of numerous known processes addressing fundamental questions, such as the origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe.

Scientists will study the properties of matter under extreme temperature and density, and will also be searching for candidates for dark matter and for other new phenomena, either through direct searches or – indirectly – through precise measurements of properties of known particles. “We’re looking forward to measurements of the Higgs boson decay to second-generation particles such as muons. This would be an entirely new result in the Higgs boson saga, confirming for the first time that second-generation particles also get mass through the Higgs mechanism,” said CERN theorist Michelangelo Mangano.

“We will measure the strengths of the Higgs boson interactions with matter and force particles to unprecedented precision, and we will further our searches for Higgs boson decays to dark matter particles as well as searches for additional Higgs bosons,” said Andreas Hoecker, spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration. “It is not at all clear whether the Higgs mechanism realised in nature is the minimal one featuring only a single Higgs particle.”

A closely watched topic will be the studies of a class of rare processes in which an unexpected difference (lepton flavour asymmetry) between electrons and their cousin particles, muons, was studied by the LHCb experiment in the data from previous LHC runs. “Data acquired during Run 3 with our brand new detector will allow us to improve the precision by a factor of two and to confirm or exclude possible deviations from lepton flavour universality,” said Chris Parkes, spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration. Theories explaining the anomalies observed by LHCb typically also predict new effects in different processes. These will be the target of specific studies performed by ATLAS and CMS. “This complementary approach is essential. If we’re able to confirm new effects in this way it will be a major discovery in particle physics,” said Luca Malgeri, spokesperson of the CMS collaboration.

The heavy-ion collision programme will allow the investigation of quark–gluon plasma (QGP) – a state of matter that existed in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang – with unprecedented accuracy. “We expect to be moving from a phase where we observed many interesting properties of the quark–gluon plasma to a phase in which we precisely quantify those properties and connect them to the dynamics of its constituents,” said Luciano Musa, spokesperson of the ALICE collaboration. In addition to the main lead–lead runs, a short period with oxygen collisions will be included for the first time, with the goal of exploring the emergence of QGP-like effects in small colliding systems.

The smallest experiments at the LHC – TOTEM, LHCf, MoEDAL, with its entirely new sub detector MAPP, and the recently installed FASER and SND@LHC – are also poised to explore phenomena within and beyond the Standard Model, from magnetic monopoles to neutrinos and cosmic rays.

A new era of physics is starting, with a broad and promising scientific programme in store, said the organisation.

More on this:
CERN press release (in English) 

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