LHC@home

The hunt for new physics is back on. The world’s most powerful machine for smashing high-energy particles together, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has fired up after a shutdown of more than three years. Beams of protons are once again whizzing around its 27-kilometre loop at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. By July, physicists will be able to switch on their experiments and watch bunches of particles collide.

In its first two stints, in 2009–13 and 2015–18, the LHC explored the known physics world. All of that work — including the triumphant 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson — reaffirmed physicists’ current best description of the particles and forces that make up the Universe: the standard model. But scientists sifting through the detritus of quadrillions of high-energy collisions have yet to find proof of any surprising new particles or anything else completely unknown.

This time could be different. The LHC has so far cost US$9.2 billion to build, including the latest upgrades: version three comes with more data, better detectors and innovative ways to search for new physics. What’s more, scientists start with a tantalizing shopping list of anomalous results — many more than at the start of the last run — that hint at where to look for particles outside the standard model.

“We’re really starting with adrenaline up,” says Isabel Pedraza, a particle physicist at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico. “I’m sure we will see something in run 3.”