The LHC, World’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is all set to be rebooted again this month-end to discover more findings on “what is dark matter”.
It was the Hubble telescope which for the first time discovered dark matter and dark energy. It further enlightened that noticeable matter is just 5 percent of the universe and 70 percent of the universe is dark energy and the remaining 25 percent is dark matter.
What is dark matter? This is the stuff that pulls gravitationally on matter around it, it is invisible because it does not interact with light and this makes it hard to detect.
The scientist has never come across a particle which exhibits such properties, and they are eagerly waiting that they could find the particle responsible for dark matter from the debris of the LHC collision.
What is LHC? LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider which is in Geneva. It is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world which is built by CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
This machine has long, oval shape tunnel where the subatomic particles like the protons, neutrons move at the speed of light. These two beams of particles are pointed against each other so that they can make a head on collision. This collision generates hot cloud of debris reaching temperatures which is 1,000,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and this debris may contain some never seen particles.
Back in 2008, just nine days into its first run of experiments, there was a significant incident at the Large Hadron Collider which has damaged some parts of it and was sent for repair.
After the collider coped, on July 4th 2012, there was another experiment performed at the LHC. There were two experiments conducted one at LHC and other at CMS and ATLAS. The result of the experiment was the biggest findings ever. They discovered a new invisible particle called the Higgs Boson. This is the particle which gives mass to everything and holds the universe together.
The LHC was shut down for maintenance and after two years, now the scientists are going to conduct a new experiment.