Their work should double the energy of what's already the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. BBC News is the first to be allowed to see inside the LHC - on the French-Swiss border - to watch the work being carried out. Scientists believe the upgrade will enable them to discover new particles which will lead to a more complete theory of how the Universe works. A project leader with the LHC's Atlas experiment, Dr Pippa Wells, told BBC News that there was much more to come from the LHC. "The past two years have been the most exciting in my time as a particle physicist. People are absolutely fired up. They've made one new discovery (the Higgs) and they want to make more discoveries with the new high energies that the upgrade will give us. We could find a new realm of particle physics."
I was taken by the technical coordinator for the upgrade project, Katy Foraz, and Cern's UK communications manager Stephanie Hills, to one of the many access points to the LHC's underground tunnels. We entered a lift shaft with two buttons marked zero and minus 1. Katy hit minus 1 and we made our way 100m below the surface. As we exited the lift, we walked to a large heavy green door that we strained to open. As we went through, it was like entering Aladdin's cave. No jewels or gold - but one of the largest and most complex machines ever built. A bright blue superconducting beamline stretches into the distance - around it are gleaming precision instruments to make the line one of the coldest places in the Universe. In front of me, engineers were replacing some of the first connectors. In all, 10,000 will need to be changed. Eight hundred people are involved in this project, which will cost £70m.
Granny says, "Ack - don't mess with dat thermatic balancer or ya gonna blow us all up, gurl!"
The tasks also include testing and replacing some of the LHC's main dipole and quadrupole magnets, which are used to bend the paths of the particles and keep them tightly bunched; conducting tests to detect any irregularities in the magnets or imperfections in the electrical insulation; and a range of other work to improve the machine. The LHC is known for its cutting-edge science. But as we walked to this scientific wonderland, Katy told me that people often forget that the particle accelerator is also on the cutting edge of engineering. After all, creating the conditions of the beginning of the Universe is no easy feat. "We are always at the limit of what we know in terms of the technology. It is very exciting: as the coordinator. I have access to all the technologies and they really are at their limit in terms of superconductivity cryogenics. It is very exciting for an engineer to be close to all these new technologies," she said.
Katy and her team of engineers are calling the work an "upgrade". But critics say it's a "repair". As we walked passed a team replacing a damaged connector, Cern's Stephanie Hills was quick to respond to the charge that this expensive refit is putting right a mistake that should not have been made in the first place. "Nobody has ever done this kind of technology before. Everything from the most basic welding to the most complicated beam diagnostics is pushing the boundaries of technology, and sometimes these things just don't go right simply because we don't know how it's going to work," she told me. "You can see in front of us the way that we're managing the upgrade is meticulous. There is lots and lots of quality control, making sure that everything's absolutely spot-on so that when we turn the machine back on we are absolutely ready for some more fantastic scientific discoveries." The damage was done shortly after the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider in September 2008.
More BBC News - LHC upgrade to open up 'new realm of particle physics'
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon. Baryons are subatomic particles made up of quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common baryons. Quarks are even smaller particles that come in six types, two common types that are light and four heavier types.
The high-speed collisions at the world's biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment. The particle has two heavy quarks - both of a type that are called "charm"- and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark. It may have been brief, but in particle physics it lived for "an appreciably long time," he said.
People visit the new linear accelerator Linac 4, the newest accelerator acquisition since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is due to feed the CERN accelerator complex with particle beams of higher energy, during its inauguration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland
The two heavy quarks are in a dance that's just like the interaction of a star system with two suns and the third lighter quark circles the dancing pair, Wilkinson said. "People have looked for it for a long time," Wilkinson said. He said this opens up a whole new "family" of baryons for physicists to find and study. "It gives us a very unique and interesting laboratory to give us an interesting new angle on the behavior of the strong interaction (between particles), which is one of the key forces in nature," Wilkinson said.
Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at the Fermilab near Chicago, who wasn't part of the discovery team, praised the discovery and said "it gives us a lot to think about." The team has submitted a paper to the journal Physical Review Letters. The Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN.
Physicists Find New Particle With a Double Dose of Charm
The micro-black holes the Hadron may be creating don't last long enough to suck in anythingAnother experiment, another minute chance to suck the Earth into a black hole.
