CERN Accelerating science

LHC

Searching for dark energy with particle colliders

The expansion of our universe is accelerating, and we don’t understand why. The observational evidence for this is so compelling that its discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011, and yet none of our current theories explain how this can be…

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Physics at 100 TeV

A report discussing the opportunities for physics discoveries with a future 100 TeV hadron circular collider was presented earlier this summer during the 2016 FCC Week.   A future hadron-hadron collider machine will be able to cover previously…

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Charting the Unknown: interpreting LHC data from the energy frontier

The LHC has started its Run2, exploring for the first time the high-energy frontier at 13 TeV. Collected data will give decisive information on the dynamics behind electroweak symmetry breaking and allow testing the weak-scale naturalness. A TH…

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LHC sees first circulating beams

Long Shutdown 1 officially came to an end on 5 April 2015, when a beam of protons circulated the LHC for the first time after two years. Following this long period of upgrades, repairs, and consolidation, the LHC is now ready to restart at 13 TeV,…

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Injection tests make a splash

  On Saturday 7 March, two of the LHC experiments saw proton beams for the first time after a two-year stop. Beam 2 (anticlockwise) made it through LHCb at 10.30 and Beam 1 (clockwise) passed through ALICE at 17.00. The two experiments were…

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A philosophical experiment

In 2008 a group of high-energy physicists, philosophers and historians of science decided to join forces to take a closer and critical look at the knowledge production which would accompany the first phase of operation of the LHC. In 2010, thanks to…

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LHC upgrades: the landscape becomes clearer

Many of you have contacted me recently concerning the LHC detector upgrades, with some questions about the planning of future work. It is true that the one year stop after the LHC incident in September 2008, the need of a further shutdown to…

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