LHC experiments are back in business at a new record energy
Today, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started delivering physics data for the first time in 27 months. After an almost two-year shutdown and several months recommissioning, the LHC is now providing collisions to all of its experiments at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, almost double the collision energy of its first run. This marks the start of Run 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new discoveries. The LHC will now run round the clock for the next three years.
Nicolo de Groot, joint programme leader ATLAS at Nikhef and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen: "The discovery of the Higgs boson was the highlight of Run 1. In Run 2 we can make precise studies of the Higgs boson and search for the particles that constitute dark matter. With the higher energy we will enter a completely unknown area. Something completely unexpected would be fantastic."
3 June at 10.40 a.m.: the LHC operators declared 'stable beams', the signal for the LHC experiments that they can start taking data. Beams are made of 'trains' of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27-kilometre ring of the LHC. These bunch trains circulate in opposite directions, guided by powerful superconducting magnets.
Today the LHC was filled with six bunches each containing around 100 billion protons. This rate will be progressively increased as the run goes on to 2.808 bunches per beam, allowing the LHC to produce up to 1 billion collisions per second.
Stan Bentvelsen, director Nikhef and former programme leader ATLAS: "After the discovery of the Higgs particle we are really curious to know how the Standard Model can exist and how dark matter fits within that. There is a good chance that LHC will find answers to this."
During the first run of the LHC, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, which was the last piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model, a theory that describes the fundamental particles from which everything visible in the universe is made, along with interactions at work between them.
With Run 2 starting today, physicists have the ambition to further explore the Standard Model and even to find evidence of new physics phenomena beyond its boundaries, which could explain remaining mysteries such as dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe, or nature's apparent preference for matter over antimatter, without which we would not exist.
Over the two-year shutdown, the four large experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb also went through an important programme of maintenance and improvements in preparation for the new energy frontier.
Dutch contribution to LHC experiments
FOM institute Nikhef is making a contribution to three of the four large experiments of the LHC, namely ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb.
ALICE
Nikhef's contribution to ALICE focuses on three parts of the research: the measurement of the collective behaviour/the collective flow, heavy quark energy loss and the question about how jets are modified in the quark-gluon plasma.
ATLAS
Nikhef’s contribution to ATLAS focuses on the large muon chambers, the tracks detector and the read-out electronics. Nikhef is active within the analysis of the Higgs boson and the search for new particles that could provide an explanation for dark matter.
LHCb
Nikhef’s contribution to LHCb focuses on the Vertex Detector, the large wire chambers and the trigger.
Marcel Merk: "LHCb is fully ready ready to analyse the collisions at high energy. During Run 1 a matter - antimatter asymmetry was discovered during the decay of the Bs-meson particle, and the very rare decay of the Bs-meson into two muons was observed. The focus of Run 2 is on solving the puzzles that came to light during Run 1. With Run 2 of LHC the LHCb experiment will have the unique opportunity to look even deeper into the quantum structure of nature. With this we hope to discover particles that can explain the mystery of the missing antimatter in the universe."
More information
For more information, please visit the Nikhef website.
Contact information
Surya Bonam, +31 20 592 50 75