CERN Smashes Protons Near Light Speed for Big Bang Clues
Updated
Updated · The Hindu · Jul 4
CERN Smashes Protons Near Light Speed for Big Bang Clues
2 articles · Updated · The Hindu · Jul 4
Summary
Beneath the Franco-Swiss border, CERN physicists are colliding protons at a hair below light speed to probe how the universe was built in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
At the ALICE detector—one of four major collision experiments—scientists track the multicolored debris from each impact for signs of new matter and evidence explaining why matter survived over antimatter.
The work unfolds even as a June heatwave grips Europe, underscoring the scale and intensity of operations inside CERN's vast underground accelerator complex.
Those collisions are aimed at finding phenomena that have so far eluded physicists, making each burst of particle debris a potential clue to the universe's fundamental structure.
Could a particle's bizarre decay at CERN be the key to solving the universe's greatest mystery: what is dark matter?
With the LHC now shut down, will its final data finally shatter our 50-year-old understanding of physics?
From LHC to HL-LHC: Major 2026 Shutdown, Pre-Upgrade Discoveries, and the Future of Particle Physics
Overview
In June 2026, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its third Long Shutdown (LS3) to prepare for a major upgrade. The main goal is to transform the LHC into the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), which will deliver much better performance and produce larger datasets. This upgrade will increase the rate of particle collisions, making it more likely to observe rare phenomena. With these improvements, scientists will be able to study the Higgs boson in greater detail than ever before, building on its discovery in 2012 and opening new possibilities for understanding the universe.