Members of Sussex's ATLAS team include, from left: Professor Antonella De Santo, Dr Fabrizio Salvatore and Dr Tina Potter. LHC image courtesy of Maximilien Brice

Physicists from the University of Sussex are hoping to discover “new physics phenomena” after CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began smashing particles with roughly twice the energy that was achieved during its first run.

Professor Antonella De Santo is leading a team of Sussex particle physicists working on the ATLAS experiment, which involves powerful beams of particles called protons being accelerated around the LHC’s 27km-long underground tunnel, then smashed together head-on at very high energies.

These collisions recreate the conditions that existed in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and could provide answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.

Professor De Santo said: “The Large Hadron Collider has broken yet another record and is now colliding beams at unprecedented high energies. This opens up a whole new frontier for physics exploration, and at Sussex we all feel the excitement of the true pioneers.

“At the new energies we hope to unearth evidence of new physics phenomena which have never been observed before and which could change our understanding of how our Universe works. There is so much to do, and we can't wait to get hold of the new data!”

The ATLAS and other experiments helped prove the existence of the Higgs boson in July 2012 during the LHC’s initial run, which was followed by a hiatus while the particle collider underwent maintenance and an upgrade.

Professor De Santo is excited about the new discoveries that could emerge from colliding particles at higher levels of energy: “For me the most exciting thing to discover would be supersymmetry, or SUSY – which I've been searching for since the inception of the LHC.

“SUSY postulates the existence of a ‘mirror’ set of particles to the ones that we already know to exist. One of these new particles, the so‑called neutralino, could explain the origin of dark matter in our universe.”

Dr Alex Cerri, who as ATLAS Run Coordinator has overall responsibility for the experiment's data taking, added: “First stable beam data taking feels like playing the first bars of a well‑rehearsed symphony: tension and excitement mixed with anticipation.”

The Sussex team working alongside Professor De Santo and Dr Cerri includes fellow Sussex physicists Dr Fabrizio Salvatore, Dr Iacopo Vivarelli and Dr Lily Asquith as well as many junior researchers and students.

The LHC is an international project based at the CERN laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland.