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Atom smasher makes big comeback
Source: Agencies |
December 15, 2009, Tuesday
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THE world's largest atom smasher produced 50,000 proton collisions at the highest energy level ever recorded, the operators said yesterday.
The weekend run demonstrated how well the Large Hadron Collider is working in preparation for going to an even higher energy level next year for experiments to delve further into the makeup of matter, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
The new US$10 billion machine, which has made a nearly flawless comeback after being heavily damaged during a startup collapse a year ago, was built to examine suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
"After only three weeks of running it almost felt like routine operation in the CERN control center," said Heuer.
The LHC provided well over 1 million lower-energy collisions to each of the major "experiments" - massive detectors in cathedral-sized rooms along the 27-kilometer circular accelerator in a tunnel 100 meters underground near Geneva, on the Swiss-French border.
The low energy collisions enabled operators to calibrate the machine and detectors with showers of particles already discovered so that there will be a solid basis for understanding what happens when higher energy experiments start next year.
Heuer said all experiments got "a very good set of data" from long periods of stable beams.
Two beams of circulating particles traveling in opposite directions at 1.18 trillion electron volts produced the collisions, about 20 percent higher than the previous record set by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab outside Chicago.
The particle beams travel at nearly the speed of light, circling the tunnel in fire-hose-sized pipes 11,000 times a second until powerful, superconducting magnets force the beams to collide to see what will occur.
"The experiments saw about 50,000 collisions" at the higher energy, said Heuer. "With only three days of operation to go before the end-of-the-year technical stop, the experiments have many events to look at in the new year, and the LHC operators have learned a lot about their machine, which is running more smoothly than anyone could have expected."
Major new scientific discoveries are expected after the beams are ramped up still higher, to 3.5 TeV, probably by February.
The collider was started with great fanfare on September 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It took 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted. The overall price of repairs and improvements is expected to cost US$40 million.
The weekend run demonstrated how well the Large Hadron Collider is working in preparation for going to an even higher energy level next year for experiments to delve further into the makeup of matter, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
The new US$10 billion machine, which has made a nearly flawless comeback after being heavily damaged during a startup collapse a year ago, was built to examine suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
"After only three weeks of running it almost felt like routine operation in the CERN control center," said Heuer.
The LHC provided well over 1 million lower-energy collisions to each of the major "experiments" - massive detectors in cathedral-sized rooms along the 27-kilometer circular accelerator in a tunnel 100 meters underground near Geneva, on the Swiss-French border.
The low energy collisions enabled operators to calibrate the machine and detectors with showers of particles already discovered so that there will be a solid basis for understanding what happens when higher energy experiments start next year.
Heuer said all experiments got "a very good set of data" from long periods of stable beams.
Two beams of circulating particles traveling in opposite directions at 1.18 trillion electron volts produced the collisions, about 20 percent higher than the previous record set by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab outside Chicago.
The particle beams travel at nearly the speed of light, circling the tunnel in fire-hose-sized pipes 11,000 times a second until powerful, superconducting magnets force the beams to collide to see what will occur.
"The experiments saw about 50,000 collisions" at the higher energy, said Heuer. "With only three days of operation to go before the end-of-the-year technical stop, the experiments have many events to look at in the new year, and the LHC operators have learned a lot about their machine, which is running more smoothly than anyone could have expected."
Major new scientific discoveries are expected after the beams are ramped up still higher, to 3.5 TeV, probably by February.
The collider was started with great fanfare on September 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It took 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted. The overall price of repairs and improvements is expected to cost US$40 million.
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