The Large Hadron Collider (HAC) has resumed operations after a hiatus of more than three years. Today, for the first time at this time, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth swept two beams of protons. The European Organization for Nuclear Research has spent the last three years working on the maintenance and major modernization of the system. The scientists are now preparing to begin a new four-year study period for data collection.

During the second long idle acceleration complex, machinery and equipment underwent a major modernization. The HAC itself has undergone a major consolidation program and will now operate at even higher energy and provide much more data for modernized experiments, thanks to significant improvements in the injection complex.

The new work cycle will begin in the summer. Until then, HAC experts will work around the clock to gradually restore the machine and safely increase the energy and intensity of the beams, before executing collisions in experiments with a record energy of 13.6 TeV.

This third run of HAC, called Run 3, will run experiments to collect not only record energy but also unprecedented amounts of data on collisions. While the ATLAS and CMS experiments can expect more collisions during this physical startup than the two previous physical launches combined, the LHCb with a full boost during shutdown may see a threefold increase in collisions. Meanwhile, ALICE, a dedicated detector for the study of heavy ion collisions, will achieve a fifty-fold increase in the total number of registered ion collisions due to the recent completion of major updates.

One of Run 3’s main tasks is to look for physics outside the Standard Model. In fact, scientists will try to discover “new physics” that would explain what, as they now call it, does not allow to fully define the Standard Model. Source