article_snippet: (CNN)It may not provide the answer to life, the universe and everything, but when the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva's CERN starts up again this month, particle physicists are planning to give this question particle physicists best shot.
article_snippet: And with the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva's CERN -- the 27km (17 mile) circumference particle accelerator that occupies a tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border -- now tricked out with new magnets, more powerful energy beams and a tighter vacuum, scientists are hoping to shine a light on some of the universe's more arcane phenomena.
article_snippet: Higgs was the final piece of the jigsaw of what CNN call the Standard Model of particle physics," Dr Mike Lamont, operations group leader at the facility, told CNN.
article_snippet: Particle physicists will no doubt be on the edge of Particle physicists seats when the new souped-up collider is put through the new souped-up collider paces this month, although the new souped-up collider can take months for the data to be processed.
article_snippet: What the physicists are hoping is that with the step up in energy we will be able to explore a bit more of parameter space and that something dramatically new will show up.
article_snippet: The increased energy of the new souped-up collider will be key to the new studies.
article_snippet: The energy of collisions in the LHC in 2015 will be 13 TeV (teraelectron volt) compared with 8 TeV in 2012 during its last run.
article_snippet: While there are billions of protons per package sent hurtling through the collider at a rate of 11,000 times per second, only 20 or 30 protons per package will actually collide to produce an effect that can be studied.
article_snippet: Scientist must monitor equipment that registers hundreds of millions of collisions per second typically over 12-hour periods.
article_snippet: The experiments need this because the interesting stuff like the Higgs is extremely rare.
article_snippet: Only very rarely do these collisions produce something interesting and this is the big challenge for us -- to trigger the interesting stuff," Scientist said.
article_snippet: the Higgs may have gone a long way to answering the questions thrown up by the Standard Model, but Lamont says there will still be plenty of good physics to be examined by what is effectively the world's biggest machine.
article_snippet: We're planning a major upgrade in 2023-25 -- there'll be new more powerful focusing magnets installed and some other upgrades and this will allow We to multiply by five the number of collisions We can deliver.
article_snippet: Scientist remains sanguine, however, about the possibility that after weeks of collisions and months and sometimes years of study, scientists and researchers may have actually moved further away from answering the mysteries and paradoxes of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
highlights_snippet: The LHC, a 27km (17 mile) particle accelerator, is ready to fire up again after a two-year upgrade .
  