CERN
restarts Large Hadron Collider, seeks dark universe
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[April 06, 2015]
By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's
physics research center CERN on Sunday restarted their "Big Bang" Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), embarking on a bid to probe into the "dark
universe" they believe lies beyond the visible one.
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CERN reported that particle beams were successfully pushed around
the LHC in both directions after a two-year shutdown for a major
refit described as a Herculean task that doubled its power -- and
its reach into the unknown.
"It's fantastic to see it going so well after such a major
overhaul," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer told delighted
scientists and engineers as the beams moved round the tubes of the
27-km (17-mile) underground complex.
But it will be two months before particle collisions --
mini-versions of the Big Bang primordial blast that brought the
universe into being 13.8 billion years ago -- begin and at least a
year more before any results can be expected.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Apr/06/images/ads/current/LPL_small%201.gif) Study of many billions of collisions in the LHC's first run from
2010-2013 produced proof by 2012 of the existence of the Higgs boson
and its linked force field, a long sought mechanism that gives mass
to matter.
But that was part of the 40-year-old Standard Model of how the
universe is believed to work at the level of the fundamental
particles that make up everything in it, including life.
With its capacity to smash particles together at almost the speed of
light and at a collision energy twice that of its first run,
scientists hope that the revamped LHC will produce evidence of what
has been dubbed "New Physics".
Among elements of this concept are the "dark matter" thought to make
up some 96 per cent of the stuff of the universe while being totally
invisible, and super-symmetry, or SUSY, under which all visible
particles have unseen counterparts.
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"If I had to bet on what we will find, I would go for SUSY," said
Oliver Buchmueller, a scientist on one of the four machines around
the ring that records each collision. "But we could also find
something very, very unexpected," he added.
"This is what makes life on the energy frontier so exciting."
But CERN will only gradually move towards applying the full energy
now within the power of the LHC, mindful of a helium leak in 2008
that forced postponement of the machine's first LHC run for two
years, and an electrical fault that put off Sunday's start-up,
originally set for last month, by two weeks.
(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by John Stonestreet and Stephen
Powell)
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