Latest experiment at Large Hadron Collider reports first results
After a two-year hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, began its second run of experiments in June, smashing together subatomic particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) — the highest energy ever achieved in a laboratory. Physicists hope that such high-energy collisions may produce completely new particles, and potentially simulate the conditions that were seen in the early universe. In a paper to appear in the journal Physics Letters B, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reports on the run’s very first particle collisions, and describes what an average collision between two protons looks like at 13 TeV. One of the study leaders is MIT assistant professor of physics Yen-Jie Lee, who leads MIT’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Group, together with physics professors Gunther Roland and Bolek Wyslouch. In the experimental run, researchers sent two proton beams hurtling...