Apr 6 2015
Scientists at the University of Sheffield are hoping their work will help to make a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the universe as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to be switched back on over Easter.
The particle accelerator, which is best known for identifying the Higgs Boson in 2012, has been switched off for the last two years allowing scientists to check and improve the electrical connections between its superconducting magnets.
This weekend the accelerator, which is located at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, will be turned on once more allowing beams to again start circulating with the first particle collisions expected in May.
Professor Dan Tovey, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield, said: "After the restart the LHC will be running at almost twice its previous energy. This extra energy will greatly increase the potential of the LHC experiments for discovering new particles such as dark matter and particles predicted by new theories such as supersymmetry.
"Such is the power of the new, improved LHC that just one day's worth of data in 2015 could be equivalent to all the data taken previously by the LHC since 2010 in terms of production of new particles. It’s a tremendously exciting time to be a particle physicist!"
The LHC – which recreates conditions that existed billionths of a second after the universe began - discovered the Higgs boson, responsible for the mass of all the fundamental particles in 2012. The hope now is that it will find answers to more of the biggest mysteries of the universe by discovering dark matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry or other new phenomena.
Scientists at the University, led by Professor Tovey, have been involved in the ATLAS experiment – one of the biggest experiments running at LHC. ATLAS, a specially built detector, is designed to observe and detect what happens when high energy particles collide.
Along with other UK institutes, Professor Tovey and colleagues were also given the vital task of creating the SCT tracking detector, which is located right at the centre of ATLAS, surrounding the region where all the collisions take place.
The team has also been involved in writing the software which processes the data that ATLAS creates and run one of the supercomputers on the worldwide computing 'Grid' on which software runs. The team is now heavily involved in analysing the data to understand the Higgs boson in more detail and search for new particles which might overturn our view of how the universe works.
Additional information
The University of Sheffield
With almost 26,000 of the brightest students from around 120 countries, learning alongside over 1,200 of the best academics from across the globe, the University of Sheffield is one of the world’s leading universities.
A member of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group of leading research-led institutions, Sheffield offers world-class teaching and research excellence across a wide range of disciplines.
Unified by the power of discovery and understanding, staff and students at the university are committed to finding new ways to transform the world we live in.
In 2014 it was voted number one university in the UK for Student Satisfaction by Times Higher Education and in the last decade has won four Queen’s Anniversary Prizes in recognition of the outstanding contribution to the United Kingdom’s intellectual, economic, cultural and social life.
Sheffield has five Nobel Prize winners among former staff and students and its alumni go on to hold positions of great responsibility and influence all over the world, making significant contributions in their chosen fields.
Global research partners and clients include Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Glaxo SmithKline, Siemens and Airbus, as well as many UK and overseas government agencies and charitable foundations.
Source: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/