The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It is a precise and complex scientific instrument which can be used to accelerate and collide particles in two counter-rotating beams to study the elementary particles which make up our universe, such as the Higgs boson (which explains the origins of mass), while also searching for new particles predicted by several theories related to supersymmetry, dark matter and the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang.
Two major particle physics experiments at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year.
CERN continuously supports and enables R&D in relation to high-energy physics and particle accelerators. The TWOCRYST international collaboration, comprising 60 scientists from CERN, INFN, University of Malta, University of Valencia, IJC Lab, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology and the Institute of Nuclear Physics, was set up to demonstrate the feasibility of a novel experimental concept, in which particles circulating in the LHC are channelled through two bent crystals towards a fixed target to study the fundamental properties of short-lived charm baryons, in particular their electric and magnetic dipole moments.
CERN continuously supports and enables R&D in relation to high-energy physics and particle accelerators
In June 2025, TWOCRYST achieved a major milestone by demonstrating double crystal channelling for the first time in the LHC and at the unprecedented proton energy of 450 GeV. Clear signals of double-channelling were recorded in both detectors, as shown in the figure above.
The University of Malta is contributing towards the TWOCRYST collaboration through the AICRYSCON (AI-driven control of the two-crystal fixed target experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider) project, funded by Xjenza Malta. Apart from developing the necessary software to read out data from the detectors and participating in the LHC beam tests, the research team is also working on a reinforcement learning algorithm that can automatically align the crystals to the beam to ensure that the experimental set up is correct at all times.
The research team working on the AICRYSCON project consists of Gianluca Valentino (principal investigator) and Leander Grech (research support officer IV), both from the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, University of Malta. The AICRYSCON project is financed by Xjenza Malta through the Research Excellence Programme. For more information, visit https://twocryst.web.cern.ch/ and https:// home.cern/news/news/experiments/towards-new-physics-bent-crystals.
Photo of the week
The ALICE detector at CERN.
Credit: J Ordan/CERN-PHOTO-201903-053-1
Sound Bites
CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider detects very rare event
• The detection of the production of a single top quark, along with a W and a Z boson, marks the observation of an extremely rare event that will help scientists in understanding the fundamental forces of nature, specifically the interaction of the top quark with the electroweak force carried by W and Z bosons. This event is expected to occur in one out of every trillion proton collisions. With the top quark being the heaviest fundamental particle known, it opens up possibilities in observing its interaction with the Higgs field, allowing for investigations into the Higgs mechanism.
https://home.cern/news/news/physics/first-observation-single-top-quark-production-w-and-z-bosons
For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha every Saturday at 7.30pm on Radju Malta and the following Monday at 9pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/.
DID YOU KNOW?
• The bent crystals used in the TWOCRYST set-up are only a few centimetres long, yet their atomic lattice can bend a beam of protons carrying as much momentum as a train travelling at 155 kph. To achieve that with a dipole magnet, you would need a 1.2m-long magnet with a magnetic field of one Tesla.
• The LHC is simultaneously the coldest and the hottest place in the universe. The LHC’s superconducting magnets, necessary to steer the beam around the ring, must be kept at -271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than outer space. Also, when lead ions collide in the LHC, they create very localised temperatures of around four trillion degrees Celsius – 100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun.
• The energy stored in the nominal LHC beam corresponds to the energy of a 200m-long train travelling at 155kph, or the energy stored in 90kg of TNT. The LHC therefore has several machine protection systems to ensure that the beam does not damage the accelerator infrastructure, such as the beam pipe it travels through or the superconducting magnets.
