CERN’s High-Luminosity LHC Upgrade: Physicists Gear Up to Hunt for Dark Photons and Primordial Waves

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator is undergoing a transformative upgrade. The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will dramatically increase proton beam luminosity, generating ten times more collisions than its predecessor and opening new windows into fundamental physics.

Probing the Dark Sector

With trillions of new collisions, experimental teams at ATLAS and CMS aim to observe rare Higgs boson decay channels and search for hypothetical ‘dark photons’—gauge bosons that could mediate interactions between ordinary matter and dark matter.