Hard hitting

摘要

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.