Large Hadron Collider Ready For 'Season 2', Experiments To Restart Next Week. Up to one billion proton collisions could occur every second

The event for which physicists across the world are waiting with bated breath is almost here. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the world’s most powerful particle accelerator credited with the discovery of the “God particle” Higgs boson in 2012 -- will be back in action next week, the European research organization said in a statement released Friday.

“During the second run, up to one billion proton collisions could occur every second in the detectors,” CERN said in the statement. Each beam in the collider, traveling close to the speed of light, will carry up to 2,800 “proton bunches,” colliding at a record-breaking energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV).

As CERN explains, the particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is “akin to firing two needles 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] apart with such precision that they meet halfway.”

This collision would send showers of particles through LHC’s detectors, allowing scientists to discover exotic new particles that could either bolster or “break” the Standard Model of physics.


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