Back in February 2013 CERN shut down the Large Hadron Collider. Over two years later it has been brought back online once again. CERN restarted the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator on Easter weekend. Though it’s not quite up to full speed just yet. In order to collect collision data the collider has to be brought up to a certain speed and getting to that point is going to take up to two months.
CERN’s head of beams Paul Collier explains that the process is not like simply flipping a switch. Physicists have to increase the energy gradually so they’re now looking at a mid-June timeline when they’ll finally be able to collect the first high energy data but even at this stage the collision rate will be “fairly low.”
In the next stage the physicists will slowly increase the number of protons, this will happen with data taking, increasing the number of protons means the number of collisions inside the machine will increase as well as the temperature.
It’s expected that by the end of this year particle beams circulating inside the Large Hadron Collider will reach their peak, a feat that has never before been achieved by a particle accelerator.
CERN shut down the LHC in 2013 because some 10,000 electrical connections between its supercooled magnets needed to be reinforced. So they spent nearly two years doing that. Collier says “what we’ve put together is almost a new machine,” and that the Large Hadron Collider is now 60 percent more powerful than it used to be before.
Filed in . Read more about CERN and Science. Source: theverge