When you push “start” on your microwave or computer, the device flips right on – but major physics experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, don’t work that way. Instead, engineers and physicists need to take a few weeks every year to carefully reset the collider and all the experiments on it. I’m a CERN physicist who worked with my colleagues in the past few months on the reset process of the largest of the experiments, ATLAS...
The Large Hadron Collider gets reset and refreshed each year – a CERN physicist explains how the team uses subatomic splashes to restart the experiments
Riccardo Maria Bianchi, Particle Physicist working at CERN on the ATLAS experiment, Research Associate, University of Pittsburgh