(credit: LHCb)
After more than a month of checking out the equipment, the Large Hadron Collider is set to return to the frontiers of particle physics. This will be the second run at higher energies after a few years at lower energy and a couple years of upgrades. The plan for this year is to increase the frequency of high-energy collisions in order to get a better view of the Higgs boson and pursue the search for new particles.
After suffering a catastrophic failure early in its history, the LHC was run for several years at energies that created collisions at seven or eight Tera-electronVolts. This was followed by an extended shutdown that upgraded hardware and fixed the defects that caused the earlier failure. Last year's physics run was the fist at 13TeV, and the collider's operators were relatively cautious as they learned how to control the machine at these higher energies.
The new energies provide two major advantages. Since new particles are created by converting energy to matter, the higher the energy, the heavier the particles you can produce. And some analyses have been finding hints that there might be a new particle in the neighborhood of 750 Giga-electronVolts—nearly 800 times the mass of the protons that were smashed to create it.
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