After three years of upgrades and maintenance, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, thehas fired up for a third run. On Tuesday at 10:47 a.m. EDT, the atom smasher shot beams of protons through a 16.7-mile ring of superconducting magnets in Switzerland. New upgrades will allow the LHC to achieve an increased collision energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts .
“This is a significant increase, paving the way for new discoveries,” said Mike Lamont, director for Accelerators and Technology at the European Organization for Nuclear Research , in aOne goal of the new LHC era is to better understand the structure of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle the collider uncovered a decade ago.
To hunt for these rare atomic bits, the LHC contains multiple accelerating structures to augment the energy of its particle beams. The machine uses thousands of magnets that help push the particles closer together, increasing the chance of a collision. Those beams travel almost at the speed of light before they smash together, allowing scientists to study the insides of atoms.
Through particle collisions, physicists have learned a great deal about the smallest known building blocks of matter. Also on Tuesday, CERN presented evidence of three new exotic particles, a pentaquark and two tetraquarks. The discovery could help inform physicists how quarks—pairs of subatomic particles that carry a fractional electrical charge—form. When combined, quarks are believed to create the protons and neutrons, together known as hadrons, in an atomic nucleus.
It may also help explain the creation of exotic hadrons, which are particles composed of more than three quarks.