Engineers have upgraded and remodelled the particle-accelerator LHC. Now a scheduled restart had to be delayed due to a short circuit in an electromagnet. The collection of data in 2015 will probably not be affected. During the two-year reconstruction phase, the particle-accelerator is expected to nearly double the energy levels achieved in its collisions. Physicists said they hoped this would open the door to an even deeper understanding of our universe. “We are all very excited,” CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at a press conference on March 12. Since its initial launch in 2008, CERN researchers in Geneva have been using the 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator to smash protons together at just under the speed of light. Directly after the collision, the particles break up into their smallest building blocks, like Hadrons and Bosons. One of them is the Higgs-Boson, a particle that was previously only known as a theoretical quantity, but its existence was physically proven just before the LHC was shut down three years ago. The particles are recorded with huge sensors that have a similar function to light-detecting chips in digital cameras. FULL REPORT
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