CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to Restart in Bid to Extend Frontiers of Physics https://www.wsj.com/articles/cerns-large-hadron-collider-to-restart-in-bid-to-extend-frontiers-of-physics-11649509200
The world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator is revving up to resume scientific research after work on a series of upgrades and the Covid-19 pandemic led to a roughly three-year shutdown.
A colossal ring-shaped facility buried under the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider is operated by about 2,500 staff members and used by an international community of more than 12,000 scientists, including nearly 2,000 from the U.S. In the coming weeks, these groups will be making key steps toward restarting the collider.
By simulating the conditions that existed following the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the facility has enabled the discovery of fundamental particles that sprang into existence after the universe’s birth. One of the most notable of these is the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that gives mass to other particles, which was first observed at the facility in 2012.
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