Kansas University physicists are racing the clock to complete their part of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, on the cusp of restarting collisions again after a two-year hiatus for upgrades.

And KU’s research involves a very large part: a machine weighing more than 14,000 metric tons, which is one of four particle detectors located around the 27-kilometer particle accelerator.

“It’s crunch time,” KU professor of physics and astronomy Alice Bean said. “But everyone’s really excited, because we’re going to be running at higher energy than ever before, so there’s all these new things that we could potentially discover.”

A May 31, 2007, file photo shows a view of the Large Hadron Collider in its tunnel at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. After a two-year shutdown and upgrade, the multi-billion dollar particle accelerator is about to ramp up for its second three-year run. Scientists say if nature cooperates, the more powerful beam crashes will give them a peek into the unseen dark universe. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini, File)

Thousands of scientists around the world have collaborated for decades on the accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The CERN laboratory straddles the French-Swiss border (for fiction fans, that’s the same CERN where a scientist is found brutally murdered in the opening scene of Dan Brown’s bestselling thriller and “DaVinci Code” precursor, “Angels and Demons”).

The Large Hadron Collider launched in 2008 and discovered the Higgs boson — one of two types of fundamental particles, and a “game-changer” for particle physics — in 2012, according to CERN. Upgrades to the machine and its detectors are needed to better explore the Higgs.

About 30 KU researchers are specifically involved in upgrading a pixel detector in the Compact Muon Solenoid, whose tasks include studying the Higgs and other particles, and searching for particles that could make up dark matter.

In lay terms, Bean likens the part her group is working on to a big camera that takes pictures as particles collide. But the massive camera takes 40 million pictures a second — way too much data for a human to edit — so it needs electronics that know how to sort through and save relevant information and throw out the rest.

“Most of that has to be done within a fraction of a second,” she said.

When the Large Hadron Collider restarts and begins churning out more data than ever before, the old electronics aren’t going to cut it, Bean said. So her group must update them.

A pilot pixel detector is in place for now, and Bean’s group plans to have a new detector ready to install in 2017.

The Large Hadron Collider is basically conducting warm up exercises for the next couple months and is expected to start doing collisions again in May or June.

KU was the lead institution on a grant to build part of the pixel detector, Bean said, and also had another grant that enabled KU students to travel to CERN in the summer to help with maintenance work from 2007 to 2014.

CERN describes the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment as one of the largest scientific collaborations in history, involving 4,300 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from 182 institutes in 42 countries.

It’s so big, Bean said, that the collaboration even has its own constitution and representatives who vote on issues.

“On any given day, there’s hundreds of video conferences,” she said.