In April, researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, located just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, turned on their cosmic cannon, the Large Hadron Collider. Protons, which are the exposed innards of hydrogen atoms, are now again being shot around the collider’s 17-mile electromagnetic subterranean racetrack after it was shut down for repairs and enhancements for a period of three years. At the beginning of July, the particle collider will begin its process of crashing particles together in order to produce sparks of primaeval energy.
Particle physicists’ expectations have been renewed in light of recent discoveries, and as a result, the grand game of uncovering the mystery of the cosmos is ready to begin once again. Even before it underwent its most recent repair, the collider had been giving signs that nature may be concealing something really amazing. A particle physicist from Imperial College London named Mitesh Patel who also works at CERN hailed the data from his earlier runs as “the most interesting set of findings I’ve seen in my professional career.” CERN is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Physicists working at CERN created international headlines ten years ago when they announced the finding of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle that gives mass to all of the other particles in the cosmos. What exactly is there to look for? Scientists that are pessimistic tend to say almost anything.
When the collider at CERN was switched on for the first time in 2010, the whole universe was open for exploration. The machine, which is the largest and most powerful one ever constructed, is intended to locate the Higgs boson. This particle is the cornerstone of what is known as the Standard Model, which is a system of equations that describes everything that researchers have been able to observe about the subatomic realm.
However, there are more fundamental problems about the cosmos that are not addressed by the standard model: Where did everything in the cosmos originate? The question is why it isn’t formed of antimatter instead of matter. What exactly is this mysterious substance referred to as “dark matter” that permeates the universe? How is it that the Higgs particle itself has mass?
When the massive collider was initially switched on in 2010, physicists had high hopes that this would be the year when some of the questions would finally be answered. The only thing that was discovered was the Higgs boson; specifically, there was no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. The Standard Model has not been challenged, which is a frustrating development.
At the tail end of 2018, the collider was taken down for a significant upgrading and repair project. The collider is expected to remain operational until the year 2025, after which it will be shut down for a period of two further years so that other significant modifications may be made. This set of enhancements includes modifications to the enormous detectors that are positioned at the four places where the proton beams clash and examine the debris that is produced by the collisions. These detectors will have their job cut out for them beginning in the month of July. The proton beams have been compressed in order to make them more intense.
According to Dr. Patel, “Data is going to be pouring in at a far quicker pace than we’ve been accustomed to,” and “we’ve been used to” Once upon a time, there would only be a handful of collisions at each beam crossing, but today there would be more like five of them.
“That makes our life tougher in a way, because we’ve got to be able to identify the things we’re interested in amid all those various connections,” he said. “That’s a lot of different things to engage with.” However, this indicates that there is a greater possibility of finding what it is that you are seeking for.
In the meanwhile, a number of tests have shown that the Standard Model could have some flaws, and they have provided hints that there might be a deeper, more comprehensive explanation for the cosmos. These findings concern unusual actions exhibited by subatomic particles, the identities of which are unknown to the vast majority of those seeing this from the cosmic bleachers.
Consider the muon, a subatomic particle that had a fleeting moment of notoriety in 2017. Muons are sometimes referred to as “fat electrons,” due to the fact that they possess the same negative electrical charge as electrons but are 207 times more massive. When muons were first discovered in 1936, the scientist Isador Rabi demanded to know, “Who ordered that?”
No one is really sure where muons fit in the overall scheme of things. They are formed when cosmic rays clash with one another, as well as in the processes that take place inside of colliders, and they undergo radioactive decay in a matter of microseconds, transforming into a whirlwind of electrons and the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.
A group of over two hundred scientists working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois announced a year ago that muons that were spinning in a magnetic field wobbled at a substantially quicker rate than had been anticipated by the Standard Model.
The value of a characteristic known as g-2, which characterised how the particle reacts when it is subjected to a magnetic field, was off by an eighth of a decimal place when compared to the theoretical predictions.