Scientists working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are preparing to analyze the biggest trove of data ever collected from the Large Hadron Collider (LCH).
This comes three years after the machine first helped confirm the existence of the rare Higgs boson particle in 2013. That served as a major breakthrough in physics and helped uncover many questions surrounding how elementary matter attained mass. However, though important, the finding did not shed light on the gaps in the “standard model” of physics.
The standard model is a collection of different equations that summarize everything scientists currently know about nature. While extensive, there are more than a few missing pieces. For example, researchers are unsure why gravity does not fit into the model, nor do they know why there is far more matter in the universe that the four percent we are able to see.
To help answer such questions the LHC is working harder than it ever has before, Reuters reports.
Billions of protons zoom around its 17-mile underground ring before they slam into each other at 13 Tera electron Volts (TeV). In addition, the intensity of the proton beams has been cranked up a considerable amount. Scientists hope this rise in power will gather as much data from the machine as possible.
Data from the collider is counted in what are known as “inverse femtobarns,” which measure particle collision events. Last year 2.6 of these barns were collected and 8 have already been culled since January.
Seven particle detection experiments are currently ongoing at the LHC. In December, two of them — Atlas and CMS — discovered a “bump” at 750 Giga electron Volts (GeV). That electrified the scientific community, with over 400 papers theorizing what the bump could be. However, the team says it likely could be nothing. More information needs to be collected before anything can be known for sure.
“The big reason that people are excited about this bump is that both experiments (Atlas and CMS) saw a hint in roughly the same place,” said Stefan Söldner-Rembold, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, according to BBC News. “But even this is not completely unlikely.”
If the bump is a particle, it could be a long lost cousin of the Higgs boson or a graviton — a purely theoretical particle associated with the force of gravity. While many are skeptical it is anything at all, this is one of the best times to try and discover new particles.
“This is the time when the probability of finding something new is highest,” said Tiziano Camporesi, leader of the CMS experiment at CERN, according to Reuters.
The findings from the LHC data will be shown next month at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago.
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