Particle smasher
The long wait is over: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will reboot in March after a two-year shutdown. The machine at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will restart with collisions at 13 trillion electronvolts—almost double the current record. Scientists hope that the extra firepower will help the collider to unearth phenomena that fill in gaps in the standard model of particle physics. The popular theory of supersymmetry, already in doubt, could lose further favor if the upgraded LHC cannot find evidence of the many heavy particles that the theory predicts.
Image: Worker at the Large Hadron Collider, July 2013 Credit: CERN
