Photo by: 2022 CERN
After a break of more than three years for maintenance and upgrading, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operating again late last month, when two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the particle accelerator’s 27-km ring. Preparations are now under way for the LHC’s third run, during which a record number of collision experiments will be conducted at record energy levels. These collisions will allow international teams of physicists at to study the Higgs boson in great detail and put the Standard Model of particle physics and its various extensions to the most stringent tests yet. Photograph: 2022 CERN