Video of the Day- CERN's Large Hadron Collider Gets New 'Heart', Radioactive Contamination In France
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of the four main
experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest
particle accelerator, housed underground near the France-Switzerland
border near Geneva. The experiment, which consists of a roughly 69 feet
long and a 50 feet wide detector located 300 feet below the ground, was
crucial in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
This week, the experiment was given a major upgrade — one that scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) likened to an “open-heart surgery.” On Thursday, engineers at CERN finished the installation of a new “pixel tracker” — a detector that is a key part of CMS’ particle tracking system.
“The heart of the CMS experiment is the pixel detector, the innermost instrument in the very heart of the CMS apparatus, the very point where new particles, such as the Higgs boson, are produced by the energy of the proton proton collisions of the LHC accelerator,” CERN explained in a press release. “With thousands of silicon sensors, the new Pixel Tracker is now being upgraded to improve the particle-tracking capabilities of CMS.”
The upgrade would allow the detector to record over 120 million pixels at 40 million frames per second.
This week, the experiment was given a major upgrade — one that scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) likened to an “open-heart surgery.” On Thursday, engineers at CERN finished the installation of a new “pixel tracker” — a detector that is a key part of CMS’ particle tracking system.
“The heart of the CMS experiment is the pixel detector, the innermost instrument in the very heart of the CMS apparatus, the very point where new particles, such as the Higgs boson, are produced by the energy of the proton proton collisions of the LHC accelerator,” CERN explained in a press release. “With thousands of silicon sensors, the new Pixel Tracker is now being upgraded to improve the particle-tracking capabilities of CMS.”
The upgrade would allow the detector to record over 120 million pixels at 40 million frames per second.
