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turgid [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Guardian [theguardian.com] has an article about the forthcoming upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider [theguardian.com] at CERN in Switzerland, which will be overseen by a new CERN Director General, Mark Thomson.

The LHC is famous for its use in discovering the Higgs boson [wikipedia.org], a fundamental particle whose existence was predicted in the 1960s as the means by which some other particles gain mass.

The latest upgrade, the high-luminosity LHC, will begin in June and take approximately five years. The superconducting magnets will be upgraded to increase the luminosity of the proton beams being collided and the detectors are also being upgraded.

It is hoped that the improved performance of the LHC will allow it to explore the interactions of Higgs bosons.

If the upgrade works, the LHC will make more precise measurements of particles and their interactions, which could find cracks in today’s theories that become the foundations for tomorrow’s. One remaining mystery surrounds the Higgs boson. Elementary particles gain their masses from the Higgs, but why the masses vary as they do is anyone’s guess. It is not even clear how Higgs bosons interact with one another. “We could see something completely unexpected,” Thomson says.

CERN also has plans to replace the LHC with a larger and more powerful collider called the Future Circular Collider, which will require a new 91km circular tunnel (compared with the LHC's 27km). There is no certainty as to what new science might be discovered with the FCC, and there are challenges obtaining sufficient funding. However, there are several fundamental questions to be explored by the new machine such as: what is the dark matter that clumps around galaxies; what is the dark energy that pushes the universe apart; why is gravity so weak; and why did matter win out over antimatter when the universe formed?

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