Pictures reveal bigger and better Large Hadron Collider

The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever

CMS pixel and beam pipe removal during the First Long Shutdown Photo: CERN

By Sarah Knapton

9:18PM GMT 16 Feb 2015

5 Comments

The Large Hadron Collider will restart this spring following an upgrade to allow it to discover particles which are even more mysterious than the Higgs boson.

The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever and will be able to produce collisions with 60 per cent more energy.

Scientists at Cern said the higher energies mean they stand a good chance of discovering the sub-atomic particles involved in ‘supersymmetry’ which are “twins” of the particles that form the basis of matter.

Discovering supersymmetry would be an even bigger breakthrough than finding the Higgs boson, a fundamental sub-atomic particle that accounts for gravitational attraction.

The first supersymmetry particle is likely to be something called a gluino, the symmetric twin of a gluon particle and "it could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we’re really lucky,” said Professor Beate Heinemann of the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

“This would rock the world... For me, it’s more exciting than the Higgs.”

Discovering an elusive ‘gluino’ would be mark a step forward in understanding elusive dark matter and dark energy which have so far defied detection.

The upgrades to the collider include 18 new “superconducting dipole magnets.”

The Large Hadron Collider has 1,232 of them, and CERN engineers had to replace 18 of them because of wear and tear. Additionally, they fitted over 10,000 of the connections between those dipole magnets with splices that provide alternative paths for the 11,000 amp currents.

^{The team work on the collider in 2014 (CERN)}

This will allow the interconnections to be saved even if a fault occurs.

CERN also installed nearly 60,000 new cores and more than 100 petabytes of memory so that the collider will be able to handle the significantly larger amount of data it will be processing from the experiments.

1 New magnets

2 Stronger connections

3 Safer magnets

4 Higher energy beams

5 Narrower beams

6 Smaller but closer proton packets

7 Higher voltage

8 Superior cryogenics

9 Radiation-resistant electronics

10 More secure vacuu
m