The BBC gets an exclusive look at the upgraded machine helping to overhaul our understanding of the Universe.
A hundred metres underground at the heart of the LHC: I'm shown around a ''majestic cathedral to science''They whisper about discoveries that would radically alter our understanding of the Universe.
What all this means is that there's now the best chance ever of the LHC finding subatomic particles that are completely new to science. The hope is that it will make discoveries that will spark the biggest revolution in physics in a hundred years. But 100 metres underground, it is a cathedral to science. I was able to go into the heart of the LHC, to one of the giant detectors that made one of the biggest discoveries of our generation, the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle without which many of the other particles we know about would not have mass. The Atlas detector is 46m long and 25m high. It is one of the LHC's four instruments that analyse the particles created by the LHC.
Amid the clanking and banging of the engineers finishing off Atlas's refurbishment, I find it hard to imagine that something so large is needed to detect particles that are many times smaller than an atom. It is these undiscovered particles that physicists believe hold the key to unlocking a completely new view of the Universe. Their discovery would create the biggest shift in physics thinking since Einstein's theories of relativity.
"We are looking at very rare processes, so the greater the number of collisions, the greater the chance of actually finding what is going on and seeing small anomalies," he says. But the Standard Model can't explain how gravity operates nor can it explain how invisible parts of the Universe, that physicists call Dark Matter and Dark Energy, behave. Scientists know these invisible particles and forces exist from the movement of galaxies in space - and together they account for 95 per cent of the Universe. But no-one has yet been able to prove their existence and determine what they are.
"I would say yes," she laughs, eyes widening, "yes absolutely, that would be incredible," she says, allowing herself, momentarily, to revel in the very real prospect of that happening in the coming months.This computer simulation shows dark matter sprawled across the Universe. LHC researchers hope to find it for real
"This would upend the field. It would be the biggest discovery of the LHC, the biggest discovery in particle physics since, since..."BBC News
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