The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was due to start smashing particles together at unprecedented speed yesterday, churning out data for the first time in more than two years that scientists hope could help crack the mysteries in “dark matter” theory.
The collider, a 27km underground complex near Geneva, was to smash protons at 13 tera-electron-volts (TeV), almost twice the energy achieved in an initial three-year run that began in 2010. This proved the existence of the elusive Higgs boson particle, a discovery that produced two Nobel prizes in 2013.
Nobody knows quite what the tests might reveal with the new particle collisions — said to be miniature versions of the Big Bang — but scientists hope it will produce evidence of what has been dubbed “new physics.”
This concept includes dark matter, thought to make up about 96 percent of the universe, and super-symmetry, under which all visible particles have unseen counterparts.
“The only thing we really know is that there is new physics because the model that we have is not complete,” said Luca Malgeri, a scientist working at the European physics research center CERN. “It might be linked to dark matter or it might not. It might be linked to something totally new.”
If there is a particle missing from current knowledge of the building blocks of the universe, CERN scientists hope that it could be spotted, even fleetingly, in the debris of the billions of collisions, just as the Higgs boson was.
The first results might come early because the facility already searched for smaller particles on its previous run and a bigger particle might show up quickly if high energy collisions are the key to its existence, Malgeri said.
It might have extremely weak interaction with other forces, which might explain why it had never been observed before.
The CERN scientists hope to detect dark matter by noticing that some energy is missing after a collision, which would betray the existence of such a particle, Malgeri said.
However, whether anything will be observed is anybody’s guess.
“This is the million-dollar question,” Malgeri said. “We are wide open. After the first run of the LHC, all possibilities are equally probable for new physics.”
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