The Large Hadron Collider is already extremely powerful, but now it will be even more so as it has just received a huge upgrade. Scientists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have upgraded the “atom smasher” and replaced a part from one of the four Large Hadron Collider experiments.
Science Alert reports that this upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider has been likened to a heart transplant and, more importantly, upgraded the experiment known as Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which was of particular importance in 2012 when it proved the existence of the Higgs boson particle. This new part cost $17 million and scientists hope that with it, they will be able to detect particles which had been elusive before.
Because of this new upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider, the CMS has been gifted with a brand new pixel detector, which is a camera near the center which will be used in order to track particles while they fly around at very nearly the speed of light. Facebook earlier had a live discussion that was posted by CERN which discussed this crucial upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider.
Many people may erroneously believe that the Large Hadron Collider is one object and just one experiment, but in reality, this massive object is actually comprised of different detectors that are able to capture and record the outcomes of particle collisions. And one of the biggest Large Hadron Collider experiments at the moment is the CMS experiment.
The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is so extremely big that its size could be compared to a four-story building in height with a length the size of two school buses. The new camera, which is a pixel tracker, will now be able to reconstruct paths from the subatomic particles and particles which come into being because of the atom collisions.
The new pixel tracker camera for this project at the Large Hadron Collider will be able to record 120 pixels at a speed of 40 million frames each second. Austin Ball, the technical coordinator, explained how much better this new camera would be compared with the older one.
“It’s like substituting a 66 megapixel camera with a 124 megapixel camera.”
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) March 2, 2017
CERN has explained how important this new pixel detector at the Large Hadron Collider is in a press release.
“The heart of the CMS experiment is the pixel detector, the innermost instrument in the very heart of the CMS apparatus, the very point where new particles, such as the Higgs boson, are produced by the energy of the proton proton collisions of the LHC accelerator.”
It is hoped that with this new upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider will be better equipped to solve new mysteries, such as dark matter or supersymmetry. There are some mysteries that may have already been accidentally solved, thanks to this atom smasher. One of these is the existence of ghosts.
The Inquisitr reported that Professor Brian Cox has recently discussed the possibility of ghosts, and has determined that they cannot exist, because if they did, the Large Hadron Collider would surely have picked up on them, as it did the Higgs boson particle.
“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist, then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”
The CMS is going to have further testing done on it, and once May 1 arrives, the Large Hadron Collider will be switched on again and we should see even more discoveries now thanks to its recent upgrade.
[Featured Image by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images]