‘New era’ in physics as biggest particle smasher cranks up

GENEVA: Scientists on Wednesday hailed a “new era” in their quest to unravel more mysteries of the universe as the world’s biggest particle smasher started experiments with nearly doubled energy levels in a key breakthrough.
The tests at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) came after a sweeping two-year revamp of the collider and will help scientists to study fundamental particles, the building blocks of all matter, and the forces that control them.
During its next run, researchers will look for evidence of “new physics” and probe “supersymmetry” — a theoretical concept informally dubbed Susy; seek explanations for enigmatic dark matter and look for signs of extra dimensions.
Wednesday’s collisions of 13 teraelectonvolts (TeV) followed a muscling of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), used in 2012 to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson — which confers mass and is also known as the God particle.
CERN said everything went according to plan at the giant lab, a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring-shaped tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border.
During what it dubbed as its “Season Two,” the LHC will in the course of the next three years strive to fill gaps in the so-called “Standard Model” — the mainstream theory of how the visible Universe was created but which does not explain dark matter.
“It is time for new physics!” declared CERN’s outgoing director general Rolf Heuer.
“We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works,” he said.
“It’s not going to happen tomorrow, be patient,” he said, as scientists monitoring the event broke into sustained applause and uncorked champagne.
On May 20, the LHC broke the record for energy levels colliding protons at 13 TeV — or 99.9 percent of the speed of light — for the first time.
The LHC’s previous highest energy for collisions was eight TeV, reached in 2012 before it closed for the upgrade.
“The collisions we are seeing today indicate that the work we have done in the past two years to prepare and improve our detector has been successful and marks the beginning of a new era of exploration of the secrets of nature,” said Tiziano Camporesi, a spokesman for the project.