Stakes High For CERN Stargate’s Next Run, Experts Say. Will Operate At Twice Power, Could Open ‘Doorway’ To New Physics
Stakes High For CERN Stargate’s Next Run, Experts Say. Will Operate At Twice Power, Could Open ‘Doorway’ To New Physics
The world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, credited with discovering the so-called God particle in 2012, is getting rebooted for what scientists say could be a big second act. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will double its power by running on the highest energy level ever reached by a particle accelerator, scientists announced Monday. The Large Hadron Collider is best known for detecting the Higgs boson in 2012. Nicknamed the God particle, the subatomic Higgs helps explain why much of the mass in the universe exists. But with the Hadron operating at such intensity, Gianotti said, there is the tantalizing possibility the Higgs is “a door to new physics,” or other theories about how our universe works that we just don’t know yet. “All of our studies are based on what we call the standard model,” said Hassani, but “dark matter is still an unanswered question. There must be a new thing—new physics—we need to understand.
In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a similar burst. Some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers studying the Large Magellanic cloud that orbits our galaxy, noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69 202, as it became a supernova. Since then, SN 1987a, as it was designated, has become one of the most widely studied supernovas in history. But even today, there is a significant mystery associated with this SN 1987a that astrophysicists have brushed under the carpet. The event consisted of two bursts of neutrinos separated by three hours followed by the first optical signals 4.7 hours later. Neutrinos and photons both travel at the speed of light and should therefore arrive simultaneously, all else being equal. The mystery is what caused this huge delay of 7.7 hours between the first burst of neutrinos and the arrival of the optical photons.