Scientists have high hopes for the Large Hadron Collider, which is the largest atom smasher in the world.
The collider, which was responsible for the discovery of the famous Higgs boson, underwent four major upgrades this year, the AFP reported. Now, after a two-year hiatus, the LHC is twice as powerful and ready to go.
When the LHC restarts a little bit later this year, the energy of particle collisions will be 13 TeV compared to the 8 TeV it was operating at back in 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reported. Along with a number of other upgrades, CERN installed 60,000 new cores and over 100 petabytes of additional disk storage to help accommodate the information from the scheduled experiments.
The discovery of the Higgs boson helped explain how objects have mass, and was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics. Researchers now hope to use the upgraded collider to gain insight into why nature prefers matter to antimatter, the AFP reported.
"[The finding] could be as early as this year... if we are really lucky," Beate Heinemann, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, said during a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. "Maybe we will find now supersymmetric matter. For me it is more exciting than the Higgs."
The theory of supersymmetry states that all particles have a heavier counterpart, and the scientists believe the LHC will be able to find these particles. Since the standard model of physics cannot explain the existence of dark matter, supersymmetry could help explain the secrets of our mysterious universe.
