At 12:16 p.m., the two proton beams made a first full revolution of the accelerator ring with the injection energy of 450 billion electron volts (450 GeV) in opposite directions.
The best is yet to come
– During the three-year hiatus, large-scale experiments were conducted at the collision points of the proton beams. We still have to wait a bit for the actual physics program Run3, which is scheduled to start in July. In fact, it is first necessary to test the machine and increase the intensity of the beams and their energy until the stationary energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts (13.6 TeV) is reached. An even higher energy than achieved in Run2.
particle physics
– “Run 3 opens a four-year period that promises to be exciting for particle physics,” comments Roberto Tenchini, President of the INFN’s National Scientific Commission on Particle Physics. “Lhc should make the data on the anomalies observed in the ‘b-quark’ decays during Run2 much more solid and definitely rule them out or confirm them. In addition, the studies on the properties of the Higgs boson, discovered ten years ago at the Lhc, could be carried out with much higher statistics, while expanding the area explored in search of new phenomena,” concludes Tenchini.
A record-breaking experiment
– With the Run3, collision data is collected not only with record energy, but also in unprecedented quantity. The ATLAS and CMS experiments will collect more data than those collected in the first two runs combined, while the data collected from LHCb, which underwent a full refresh during LS2, should increase by at least a factor of three. ALICE, a detector specializing in the study of heavy-ion collisions, can also expect a four to five-fold increase in the total number of ion collisions thanks to the recently completed major upgrade.
Hunt for the Higgs boson
– The unprecedented number of collisions will allow international collaboration of CERN researchers and institutes and laboratories around the world to study the Higgs boson in detail and to further test the Standard Model of particle physics and its various extensions.
big bang stuff
– Also coming with Run3 are two new experiments, FASER and SND @ LHC, designed to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. These are special proton-helium collisions to measure the frequency with which the antimatter counterparts of protons are produced in these collisions, and collisions with oxygen ions, increasing the knowledge of the physics of cosmic rays and quark-gluon plasma existed shortly after the Big Bang.