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THE Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, will start running again after a three-year shutdown and delays due to the covid-19 pandemic. The particle collider – known for its role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, which gives mass to all other fundamental particles – will return in 2022 with upgrades that give it a power boost.

Work has been under way to conduct tests on the collider and calibrate new equipment. Now, it is gearing up for experiments that could give physicists the data needed to expand the standard model, our best description of how particles and forces interact.

Phil Allport at the University of Birmingham in the UK says the upgrades could allow new measurements that give us insight into the way the Higgs boson decays, leading to a better understanding of how it fits into the standard model.

“These measurements shed light on what’s happening at the highest energies that we can reach, which tells us about phenomena in the very early universe,” he says. They will also allow us to test ideas that try to account for things that aren’t fully described by the standard model, he says.

https://www.newscientist.com/a....rticle/mg25233661-50