CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is preparing to take apart one of humanity’s most celebrated scientific instruments: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Housed in a 27-kilometer (about 17-mile) underground tunnel that straddles the border between Switzerland and France near Geneva, the LHC became world-famous in 2012 when it helped physicists confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, popularly nicknamed the “God particle” for the crucial role it plays in giving other particles their mass.
Now scientists want to push even further. Engineers will begin dismantling the current collider in order to build an even more powerful accelerator, one capable of smashing particles together at higher energies than ever before. The goal, much like with the original LHC, is to probe the fundamental structure of matter and hunt for particles or forces that remain invisible to today’s instruments—discoveries that could reveal new physics beyond the Standard Model, the theory that currently explains how the universe’s basic building blocks fit together.
The overhaul is a massive undertaking for CERN, an organization that depends on collaboration among thousands of researchers and dozens of member countries to fund and run its facilities. While exact costs and timelines weren’t detailed, the ambition echoes the LHC’s own history: years of planning and construction that eventually led to one of the biggest breakthroughs in modern physics.
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Source: Scientists Overhaul Giant Particle Collider in Search of Universe’s Hidden Building Blocks (rss.nytimes.com). English version produced with AI assistance.
Image: Ceri Thomas, BY-SA 2.0 (via Openverse).