The Future for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

Since finding the God particle over three years ago, scientists at CERN chose not to rest on their laurels and have continued pushing for new answers in the field of physics. The wider population, especially after hearing of the Higgs Boson discovery, may not have been following the amazing work CERN has been doing since 2012 with the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. 

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After its major discovery, the LHC was shut down for refurbishment, and word died down about the project. In May 2015 however, the LHC was switched back on to continue the search for more elusive particle masses which helped form the universe in the early stage of the big bang. The Higgs Boson itself was incremental to the formation of billion-year-old universal matter into the planets and galaxies we observe today, serving as an invisible field which bonded these elements to create the world as we know it today.  

Although the LHC has technically completed its initial purpose, we are entering a new and exciting stage in this grand experiment. Understanding a bit more about how the LHC itself works can help us learn more about CERN’s objectives this time around. With its newly retrofitted upgrades, the LHC now has the ability to generate energy 60% higher than its first incarnation, and in its first run since its 2 year downtime, the LHC managed to peak at its optimal energy of 6.5 trillion electron VPM. 

With these new upgrades and heightened energy output, the LHC is now able to accelerate multiple particles at a time. This number has been slowly increased over the course of 2015, starting small with 100 million protons and eventually rising to over 100 trillion protons, producing over 100 million joules of energy. In one burst, the LHC would be able to power the average household for over 24 hours. With such a massive energy output, the LHC is kept stable via reductive methodologies such as industrial cooling solutions and frequent retrofitting. 

Currently, CERN is experimenting with this new energy output by studying collisions between high levels of protons. It is thought that this methodology with unlock further clues to our natural origins. 2015 will only be the beginning of CERN’s experiments, with enough energy to eclipse the initial Higgs Boson experiments by up to four times over the next couple of years. 

What’s also interesting is observing the tonal shift of public perception regarding the LHC. This is something I feel will play into the project’s future, as more people are embracing the work CERN is doing, marking a departure from the perception of the project. In the early days of the LHC, media perception painted the project as unnecessary, especially knowing that it could potentially cause a world ending black hole. This is something that has unfairly stuck with the LHC since the early days, but has mostly faded as of 2015. 

I believe this is because people have really embraced scientific achievement in 2015.  In particular, multiple space exploration programmes have been huge successes, including Curiosity on Mars and Rosetta orbiting comet 67P. These have heightened public interest in scientific endeavour, especially in the realm of the unknown, and has given CERN and the LHC a new public perception. 

The LHC itself is collaboration between CERN and over 2,000 international scientists, universities and laboratories across 35 countries. The LHC project has always been a coordinated global effort, and signifies one of the greatest shared scientific experiments in the world. Using this momentum, the next few years should herald some other major discoveries in the field of physics, with thanks to the new capabilities of the LHC, as well as our combined continued curiosity.