newly developed Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just broke a world record with a proton beam.
LHC is located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, re Friday (April 22) after a planned three-year hiatus during which a number of improvements were made to the facility. These improvements are already being put to the test, and when you reboot and get ready for the new playback phase, it’s called play 3LHC has already surpassed the previous record.
This particle accelerator is the largest and most powerful in the world. And in a test conducted shortly after it restarted, the LHC accelerated beams of protons to a higher energy than ever before.
“Today the two experimental #LHC proton beams have been accelerated, for the first time, to a record energy of 6.8 teravolts per beam. Following #restartingLHC, this process is part of the device restart activities in preparation for #LHCRun3, planned for summer 2022,” CERN tweeted today (April 25).
Related: The Large Hadron Collider will explore the latest physics after a 3-year hiatus
Today, two beams of experimental #LHC protons have been accelerated, for the first time, to a record energy of 6.8 teravolts per beam. 🎉 After #restartingLHC, this operation is part of the device restart activities in preparation for #LHCRun3, planned for summer 2022. pic.twitter.com/8NZ6nNJSVf25 April 2022
The LHC works by accelerating two beams of particles such as protons toward each other. These high-energy beams collide, allowing particle physicists to explore the extremes of our physical world and even discover aspects of physics never seen before.
With upgrades implemented during the planned shutdown, the energy of the proton beams for the Large Hadron Collider was set from 6.5 TeV to 6.8 TeV. For reference, one teraelectronvolt is equivalent to 1 trillion electronvolt and, in terms of kinetic energy, is roughly equal to the energy of a flying mosquito. While this may seem like a very small amount of energy, for a single proton, it is an enormous amount of energy.
The LHC is used to explore cosmic mysteries that range from investigating potential dark matter candidates to completely deconstructing our understanding of physics. Now the LHC is up and running as intended with new upgrades, it is on its way to enabling a new round of groundbreaking physics research.
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