Tuesday 5 July 2022 10:00 PM As CERN's Large Hadron Collider revs up for Run 3, will it unravel the mystery ... trends now
Scientists at CERN are slamming protons together at an unprecedented energy level in order to unlock our world's most enduring mysteries - including dark matter, which we know little about despite it accounting for 26.8 percent of all mass and energy.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which restarted for its third run after undergoing extensive upgrades, shattered energy records when it was turned back on today - enabling physicists to further study the Higgs Boson and what this particle's decay can reveal about the rest of the universe.
By colliding proton beams together at 13.6 teraelectronvolts, the LHC broke a record; to give a sense of the power being unleashed at the particle collider located 300 feet underground, one tera electron volt is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000 electron volts.
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CERN physicist Katharine Leney, pictured above, works at the ATLAS Experiment and is an assistant research professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She spoke with Daily Mail about her work and hope for the future
'We think [dark matter] has mass but we don’t know anything about it,' CERN physicist Katharine Leney, who works on the ATLAS Experiment and is a research assistant professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, told Daily Mail in an interview.
'We think that maybe Higgs Boson may be interacting with it - we don’t know yet.'
Despite all of our scientific advancements, we only know about visible matter - everything that we can see - which amounts to just 4.9 percent of the entire universe. Dark energy, which we know even less about, accounts for 68.3 percent of the universe.
'Because these dark matter particles – if they weren’t interacting in any other way with other particles, they wouldn’t interact with our detector,' Leney explained in the interview.
The LHC broke a record when it hit 13.6 teraelectronvolts, which is the equivalent of 13.6 trillion electron volts. Pictured above is a still from the official restart video for run three
Despite accounting for 26.8 percent of all mass and energy, we know very little about dark matter. Pictured is a visual representation of dark matter in the universe
During its shutdown, the Large Hadron Collider and all its accompanying detectors have received major upgrades. Pictured above, scientists celebrate the start of run three
Scientists will be analyzing how the Higgs Boson interacts with other particles. Pictured above is a portion of the Large Hadron Collider
'The only way that we can tell that they’re there is to look for the absence of their presence in the detector.'
Despite its name, dark matter doesn't have any sinister or unsavory connotation. It's simply called that because it doesn't seem to interact with
