LHC 2.0 A new view of the Universe

摘要

The world's most powerful particle collider is poised to roar once again into action after a two-year hiatus. At the end of March, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, will start smashing particles together at a faster rate and with higher energies than ever before. "We're standing on the threshold of a completely new view of the Universe," says Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. The first run began in earnest in November 2009 and ended in February 2013. The LHC collided particles - mainly protons but also heavier particles such as lead ions - at high enough energies to discover the Higgs boson in 2012, which garnered those who predicted the subatomic particle a Nobel prize.