The intensity of proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will increase 10-fold after a four-year reconstruction, "Pervy Tekhnichesky" was informed by the MEPhI press service. This was stated by Evgeny Soldatov, leading researcher at the Department of Elementary Particle Physics at the university, who has experience working at CERN from the Russian side.
Earlier it was reported that the world's most powerful particle accelerator was shut down for four years for a major upgrade. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) clarified that the upgrade includes increasing the intensity of colliding proton beams and replacing the main detectors.
According to Soldatov, the size of the accelerator will not change, but the main detectors — ALICE, CMS, and ATLAS — will be enhanced, allowing them to operate at increased collision intensity. Superconducting magnets will also be replaced, and systems to increase the frequency of particle collisions will be introduced.
Speaking about the results of the LHC's work over the past 18 years, Soldatov noted that the most important result was the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, as well as the discovery of other new particles previously predicted by the Standard Model. As a result of protons colliding at enormous speeds, many particles consisting of different quarks were obtained, including very heavy ones — for example, beauty quarks.
After reconstruction, an important task for experiments at the LHC will be to expand the Standard Model. Increasing the intensity of collisions is necessary to collect more statistics and check known interactions for anomalies or deviations.
For example, the modern theory of particle physics — the Standard Model — does not include gravity. Astrophysicists see evidence of the existence of dark matter in space, but we don't even know what it should consist of yet. These are questions that physicists will try to solve in the future.