In CERN, on the outskirts of Geneva, preparations are well underway for the next spate of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We are planning for a record year, starting in June. Last year was a bounteous one, but in 2017 we expect even more collisions, at the same record-breaking high energy.
The detectors which will record the data have been under maintenance and refurbishment. Most notably, the vertex detector in the centre of the CMS experiment has been entirely replaced. The vertex detector is made of silicon; the electrons in the material only need a small nudge from a passing charged-particle to escape and carry an electric current. Those tiny currents allow us to track the path of the particle, and thus work out where it originated – the vertex. The vertex detector is a vital and complex component of the experiment. You can see a video of the (very careful) operation to insert the new one, below.
The LHC revealed the Higgs boson in 2012, but we have made no other major discovery since. It is worth asking what we hope to learn from the data coming soon.
The discovery of the Higgs boson established that the current theory, the ‘Standard Model’ can potentially work up to very high energies – as high the LHC can probe and beyond. High energies also correspond to short distances, so we are looking at the tiniest, most fundamental constituents of the universe.
There is a key energy scale in nature, in the region of the Higgs mass, which we call the ‘electroweak symmetry-breaking scale’. At this scale, the masses of fundamental particles originate. Above this scale, the weak and the electromagnetic fundamental forces come together. Physics looks very different, and without the Higgs we would have no fundamental understanding of it.
To read more and view the video, click here.