LHC Collides Beams After 2-Year Hiatus to Test Systems
After passing high energy beams without colliding them last month, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) carried out mock low energy collisions earlier this week.
Two beams with 450 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) were collided in to check and tune the detector subsystems to ensure they are working when actual experiments with high-energy beams begin later this year.
"Each low-energy collision sends showers of particles flying through an experiment's many layers. The experimental teams can use this data to check their subdetectors and ensure they fire in the correct place at the precise instant that a particle passes. Reconstructing flight paths of the particles from many parts of the detector at once helps the experiments to check the alignment and synchronization of various subdetector elements," CERN said in a news release.
LHC started functioning this year after being shutdown for two years following its Higgs Boson discovery. Researchers hope that high energy experiments during its second run this year will yield clues to dark matter.
CERN informed that LHC Operations team is halfway through its eight weeks of beam commissioning exercise which involves checking of several systems to ensure that beams circulate in a preordained manner.
"Well before the full physics programme begins, the LHC operations team will collide beams at 13 TeV to check the beam orbit, quality and stability," CERN said.
