Your questions answered: Large Hadron Collider restart

The world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, straddling the French-Swiss border, is about to begin its second round of experiments since  its original start-up in 2008. Now colliding particles at twice the speed as it did before, the LHC teams now hope to uncover the mysteries of dark matter and energy, which are believed to hold galaxies together and power the accelerating expansion of the universe. The LHC and its detectors had to be considerably upgraded to make these experiments possible. Here, CERN’s engineers talk about how the upgrades were made, how the engineering enables the exploration of new physics and what might be next for large physics experimentation.

 JT: The first concept of the LHC effectively dates back from the 1980s; nevertheless, the design of its main systems continued  up to the end of the 1990s, giving the opportunity to integrate technical developments occurring in between. Also, at the time of its initial concept, in some areas, such as computing, the expected improvements in terms of performance were taken into account, building on future improvements (Moore’s law).