CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is scheduled to reboot in March for a second three year run. The LHC has gotten a massive upgrade for this run, which scientists hope will allow for even bigger discoveries than the Higgs boson that was found on the first run.

One of the particles that researchers are hoping will how itself, the gluing, could provide go a long way in helping researchers to understand dark matter. Understanding dark matter would allow scientists to paint a much more complete picture of the universe and how everything in it operates.

During the LHC’s two years offline it has received considerable upgrades. Officials announced at the 174th session of the CERN council that the LHC has reached its optimal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero. The 16 mile long superconductor also generates considerably more power than it did during its last run.

By downgrading the magnets on one section of the ring, beams in the LHC can now reach 6.5 terra electron volts (TeV) of power.

According to Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist formerly of Harvard and Rutgers University “If an electron moves from one terminal of a nine-volt battery to the other, its motion energy will increase by nine electron-volts.

A TeV is a trillion electron-volts and if two beams, each traveling at 6.5 TeV, the collision happens with the power of 13 TeV.

It is this additional power that researchers hope will allow them to find the gluino.

“It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we’re really lucky,” said Prof Beate Heinemann, according to the BBC. Heinemann, of the University of California at Berkeley, is a spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC.

“We hope that we’re just now at this threshold that we’re finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we’ll find now supersymmetric matter,” she added.

Supersymatry, an addition to the Standard Model, predicts that each particle will have more massive partners. For example the photon, the basic particle of light, would have a partner called the photino. The gluino would be the superpartner the gluon, which holds or ‘glues’ quarks together inside of protons and neutrons.

The pre-upgrade LHC was unable to find evidence of these superparticles however there is hope that the next run will find them and the first hard evidence for supersymmetry. The LHC would not directly see the particle but would be able to track its decay, which scientists could reconstruct.

These decay particles should include the neutralino, the particle believed to make up dark matter and the missing matter of the cosmos.

“Finding any particle that could be a dark matter candidate is nice because we could start to understand how it affects the galaxy and the evolution of the universe, but it also opens the door to whatever is on the other side, which we have no idea what is there,” said Dr Michael Williams, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The ATLAS project, which is searching for this elusive particle, is just one of four large experiments being prepared for the next run of the upgraded LHC.

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is an international collaboration involving nearly 2,000 researchers. ALICE researchers are attempting to better understand the early universe. Their questions include what happens to matter when it is superheated in the heart of a star, why protons weigh so much more than the quarks that they are made of and whether or not those quarks can be freed from protons.

Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is an attempt to understand the reaction of particles during high energy collisions and Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) is an attempt to better understand anti-matter.