The time has come to restart the CERN particle collider for another series of experiments. Before the end of this month it will be rebooted by an international group of physicists. And the new venture is to figure out what dark matter is.
The Hubble telescope was the one to first detect what we now call dark matter and dark energy. It further found that visible matter is only 5 percent of the universe while 70 percent of the universe is dark energy and the last 25 percent is dark matter.
Dark matter is the stuff that attract gravitation on matter around it, it is imperceptible due to the fact that it doesn’t interact with light and this makes it difficult to spot. Researchers have never run over a molecule which displays such properties, and they are excitingly hopping that they could discover the molecule in charge of dark matter in the leftovers of the LHC collisions.
Located in Geneva, LHC or the Large Hadron Collider is the most capable atom smasher on the planet and was manufactured by CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
This huge device has long, oval -shaped pipes where the subatomic particles like the protons and neutrons move with light speed. These two types of particles are pointed against one another in order to collide. This event produces hot cloud of debris at temperatures 1,000,000 times higher than the center of the sun. And this debris may encompass the never seen molecules.
In 2008, only nine days into its first series of tests, a critical episode at the Large Hadron Collider has broke a few sections of it and the machine had to undergo some repairs.
After the collider restarted, in July 2012, there was an alternate experiment conducted. There were two trials directed one at LHC and other at CMS and ATLAS. The outcome of the experiment was the greatest discovery ever. They found the undetectable molecule called the Higgs Boson. This is the molecule which provides mass to everything and holds the universe together.
The LHC was closed down for upkeep and following two years, researchers are now going to direct another experiment.
Run Two of the LHC is scheduled to start one week from now, yet beams won’t finish the cycle before Wednesday, as per researchers at Cern.
It is presently prepared to run at its “design energy” – which implies it will crush protons together with about twofold the energies achieved during Run One.
Researchers from the LHC’s experiments say that in view of all the verification that must be carried out, they are not expecting proton beams until earlier than 25 March.
Image Source: Science News