The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is set to receive a powerful performance boost, said physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
They hope to discover new particles and, through new precision measurements, disprove existing theories, said project leader Markus Zerlauth. "This will set the course for future projects."
With the new High-Luminosity LHC accelerator, the teams plan to probe one of the universe's greatest mysteries. They seek to discover the nature of invisible dark matter, which, together with dark energy, makes up about 95% of the universe.
The building blocks of matter are neutrons, protons, quarks, and leptons. But no one has ever succeeded in detecting the particles that make up dark matter.
"The theory is that they could be much heavier than the known particles, which means you need more energy or more collisions to detect them," says Zerlauth.
As of Monday, June 29, the accelerator will be shut down. About two of the ring's 27 kilometres will be completely overhauled, with more powerful magnets and better detectors that record the decay processes following the collisions.
CERN physicist Nedaa-Alexandra Asbah compared this to photography. "You can think of it as replacing the camera at the heart of the detector with one that has much finer pixels."
Wildlife photography is an analogy, she said. "If you only take a few pictures, you may identify the animals, but you will miss rare behaviours. If you take millions of high-quality pictures, you begin to notice details that were previously invisible. The High-Luminosity LHC gives us that opportunity."
To boost performance, new superconductors were developed, needed for the magnets, which focus the proton beams more intensely so more collisions can occur.
Proton collisions generate extreme temperatures and energy levels similar to those in the milliseconds following the Big Bang, which created the universe.
Precision measurements then enable scientists to better understand the processes triggered by these collisions and draw conclusions about the origin of matter.
The modernization is expected to take four years. The total cost, including preliminary work, is 1.2 billion Swiss francs ($1.4 billion). Despite the war in Ukraine and pandemic, which drove up costs, this is only 16% above the original 2016 budget, Zerlauth said.