The LHC is upgrading to hunt for the universe's missing pieces
In short: The Large Hadron Collider has already confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. Now, it is undergoing a massive renovation to increase its collision intensity, aiming to unlock mysteries like dark matter and why gravity is so much weaker than other fundamental forces.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located 100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border at CERN, is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. It uses a 27-kilometer circular tunnel to propel particles to extreme energies using superconducting magnets. While the LHC famously proved the existence of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model of particle physics—which the Higgs boson completes—only accounts for about 5% of the universe and notably excludes gravity.
To probe the remaining 95% of the universe, the LHC is entering a new phase known as the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). This upgrade involves replacing components in 1.2 kilometers of the tunnel with new superconducting magnets. This renovation aims to increase the 'luminosity'—the total number of collisions produced over a specific period—by a factor of 10. Once operational, the number of collisions occurring each time two particle packets meet is expected to rise from 60 to between 140 and 200.
The scale of these experiments is immense. Each particle bunch contains approximately one billion particles, and when these bunches cross, they create a spray of particles for detectors like ATLAS to analyze. These detectors must manage staggering amounts of information; the experiments can generate about 40 million megabytes of data per second, which is rapidly compressed and stored in large disk farms for permanent analysis.
Starting in June 2030, the HL-LHC is projected to function for roughly ten years. The total cost for this upgrade is estimated at 1.2 billion Swiss francs, or roughly $1.5 billion, funded by CERN membership fees and in-kind contributions from nations including the United States, Japan, Canada, and China.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Q&A - Mysteries of matter at the LHC
- Also: World's largest particle smasher halts for upgrade to boost hunt for dark matter
- Also: CERN: Expert Q&A
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