GENEVA, Dec 15: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN here will restart for its second 3-year run in March 2015 that will see the world’s most powerful particle accelerator double its collisional energy.
The LHC, which is managed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), is on a 2-year break from smashing particles to undergo an upgrade.
The whole 27-kilometre superconducting machine is now almost cooled to its nominal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, CERN said.
All teams are at work to get the LHC back online and the CERN Control Centre is in full swing to carry out all the requested tests before circulating proton beams again in March next year.
Run 2 of the LHC follows a 2-year technical stop that prepared the machine for running at almost double the energy of the LHC’s first run.
“With this new energy level, the LHC will open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer.
For the first time on December 9, 2014, the magnets of one sector of the LHC, one eighth of the ring, were successfully powered to the level needed for beams to reach 6.5 TeV, the operating energy for run 2.
The goal for 2015 will be to run with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions, an energy never achieved by any accelerator in the past.
“After the huge amount of work done over the last two years, the LHC is almost like a new machine,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Frederick Bordry.
“Restarting this extraordinary accelerator is far from routine. Nevertheless, I’m confident that we will be on schedule to provide collisions to the LHC experiments by May 2015,” he said. (PTI)
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