The European Council for Nuclear Research or CERN (The name CERN is derived from the acronym for the French “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire”) has announced that the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will be turned back on in March of 2015.
The Large Hadron Collider is gearing up for Run 2 at higher energy http://t.co/FsjFYTzBLg #RestartLHC pic.twitter.com/gY5r0qRl7B — CERN (@CERN) December 12, 2014
CERN says that after two years of inactivity due to cooling, the superconductor will be up and running with collisions planned as early as May. Upgrades to the particle smashing machine have doubled its energy level and researchers hope will “open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in a statement.
On July 4th 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments on the LHC announced that they observed a particle consistent with the previously theorized Higgs-Boson particle.
The Higgs particle is the manifestation of the “Higgs field” which is said to be responsible for the transformation of mass to matter.
The Higgs Boson is essentially the fundamental particle of matter predicted by theorists Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs. The discovery of this “God particle” has produced an abundance of new questions left for physicists to answer and has confirmed theoretical models developed as early as the nineteen thirties.
The second run of the world’s largest machine gives physicists an optimistic vision heading into the New Year as they patiently await the discovery of more data of the unknown.
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