Brookhaven Physicists Play Critical Role in LHC Restart

ATLAS detector

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider

At the beginning of June, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European research facility, began smashing together protons once again after a two-year offline period. The shutdown allowed thousands of physicists worldwide to make crucial upgrades to the particle accelerator – the largest single machine in the world.

Brookhaven Lab is a crucial player in the physics program at the LHC, in particular as the U.S. host laboratory for the pivotal ATLAS experiment, one of the two large experiments that discovered the Higgs boson. Physicists at Brookhaven were busy throughout the shutdown, undertaking projects designed to maximize the LHC’s chances of detecting rare new physics as the collider reaches into a previous unexplored subatomic frontier.

While the technology needed to produce a new particle is a marvel on its own terms, equally remarkable is everything the team at ATLAS and other experiments must do to detect these potentially world-changing discoveries. Because the production of such particles is a rare phenomenon, it isn’t enough to just be able to smash one proton into another. The LHC needs to be able to collide proton bunches, each bunch consisting of hundreds of billions of particles, every 50 nanoseconds—eventually rising to every 25 nanoseconds in Run 2—and be ready to sort through the colossal amounts of data that all those collisions produce. 

It is with those interwoven challenges—maximizing the number of collisions within the LHC, capturing the details of potentially noteworthy collisions, and then managing the gargantuan amount of data those collisions produce—that scientists at Brookhaven Lab are making their mark on the LHC and its search for new physics—and not just for the current Run 2, but looking forward to the long-term future operation of the collider.

To learn more about the LHC and Brookhaven’s role visit: www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=25764

2015-5829  |  INT/EXT  |  Newsroom