""Physicists and engineers are running the final checks after a two-year upgrade that nearly doubled the muscle of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 unlocked the putative Higgs boson and, with it, a Nobel Prize.
Now it has its sights on finding exotic new particles in a previously-inaccessible realm that can sometimes resemble science fiction.""
""During its next run, researchers will look for evidence of “new physics”. They will probe ‘supersymmetry’ — a theoretical concept informally dubbed Susy, seek explanations for enigmatic dark matter, and look for signs of extra dimensions.
In late March, beams containing billions of protons travelling at 99.9 percent the speed of light will shoot through the collider’s 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring-shaped tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border.
By about the end of May or early June, the mighty machine should be calibrated and start its long-awaited proton collisions — brief but super-intense smashups recorded in four labs dotted around the ring.
Physicists scour the debris for clues of new, hopefully exotic, sub-atomic particles.
“The most important thing which we would like to find is a new type of particle which could help to explain what this mysterious dark matter is,” said Landua.
Ordinary, visible matter comprises only about four percent of the known Universe.
There is believed to be five to 10 times more dark matter, which together with equally mysterious dark energy accounts for 96 percent of the cosmos.""
Splitting a Universe:
No comments:
Post a Comment