These high-energy collisions with stable beams will mark the beginning of the third run of the LHC, called Run 3. The aforementioned gap period was known as the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), and since then, experts have worked around the clock to progressively recommission the machine and safely ramp up the energy and intensity of the beams before delivering collisions to the LHC experiments at the world-record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (13.6 TeV). The LHC is the last element of this chain, in which the beams reach their highest energies. This next machine brings the beam to an even higher energy and so on. Each machine accelerates a beam of particles to a given energy before injecting the beam into the next machine in the chain. The CERN accelerator complex is a succession of machines with increasingly higher energies. Once again, for the answer to this question, who better to articulate it than the European Organization for Nuclear Research itself. How does the Large Hadron Collider actually work? Think of a huge donut with sugar dust being chased around by a hungry Homer Simpson. Sitting on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, it consists, as CERN explains, ‘of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures that boost the energy of the particles along the way’. Have you ever been sat watching the football and thought to yourself, ‘I wonder what a particle accelerator that pushes protons or ions to near the speed of light looks like’? Well, if you have, then the LHC is your answer.

Live from CERN: Join us for the first collisions for physics at 13.6 TeV! - CERN JWhat is the Large Hadron Collider?

Eu funding of the large hadron collider