With the new upgrades, CERN has increased the power of the LHC's injectors, which feed beams of accelerated particles into the collider. However, "it's certainly very intriguing," and "would be a major, major discovery if confirmed." There's quite a significant difference," Ellis said.Įllis specified that there is still much work to be done before these findings are confirmed as a concrete discovery. However, findings like those during the LHCb experiment, which investigates the differences between matter and antimatter, "indicate that they actually don't behave in the same way. "One thing, which by the way, it did come out during the shutdown period, which certainly intrigues me, is this evidence that when bottom quarks decay, they may do so in a way that discriminates between electrons and muons," Ellis said, adding that within the standard model "we expect electrons and muons to behave in exactly the same way." And the best place to look to test those predictions is usually in the highest energies achievable," Allport added.Įllis is especially interested in exploring one particular finding that actually came during the LHC shutdown, he shared. When physicists explore unknowns like dark matter and dark energy, "these things require extensions to the standard model of particle physics to accommodate, and all of those theories make predictions. These high-energy collisions could also allow researchers to think outside of the box with their experiments and try to make sense of things that the standard model doesn't fully explain. "These measurements shed light on what's happening at the highest energies that we can reach, which tells us about phenomena in the very early universe," Phil Allport, a particle physics detector expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK, told NewScientist (opens in new tab) about what experiments with the LHC could allow scientists to do. However, the LHC will soon be back doing what it does best: accelerating protons (or ions) to near the speed of light and smashing them into one another.