Scientists fire up giant atom smasher
GENEVA: Particle physicists were jubilant on Wednesday after the
long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the
cosmos passed its first test with flying colours.
Cheers, applause and the pop of a champagne cork rather than the
cataclysmic suck of a black hole, as doomsayers had feared marked the
breakthrough at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Robert Aymar, the organisation's director general, hailed it as a
"historic day" for CERN and mankind's thirst for knowledge.
Humans have "a quest for (knowing) where they came from and where
they should go, whether the Universe will end, and where the Universe
will go in the future," he said. Just after 0730 GMT, the first proton
beam was injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHV), built 100 metres
(325 feet) underground at CERN headquarter.
The mission aims at resolving some of the greatest enigmas in
physics: whether a so-called "God particle" exists that would account
for the nature of mass; an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark
energy" that account for 96 percent of the cosmos; and whether other
dimensions exist in parallel to our own.
In a 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel on the Swiss-French
border, parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the
speed of light.
Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so
that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories,
fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the "Big Bang"
that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Arrays of detectors will trace the sub-atomic rubble spewed out from
the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.
CERN scientists have dismissed fears that the process could create a
"black hole" whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth.
Wednesday's startup marked the start of a long and cautious
commissioning process to check equipment and operational procedures
before these collisions can get underway. The first batch of protons was
halted, sector by sector, to verify that monitoring systems and the
steering magnets were working properly. Their speed was purposely slowed
for the inspection process.
The clockwise beam completed this first test lap in under an hour,
causing an eruption of joy and an outbreak of bubbly in the control
room.
"No-one would have imagined that this could have been done in less
than an hour. It's phenomonenal, quite unbelievable," an operator told
AFP. "We are very happy and proud."
By comparison, the predecessor to the LHC at CERN, the Large Electron
Positron (LEP) collider, took 12 hours to achieve the same goal.
A test of the anticlockwise beam would take place later on Wednesday,
scientists said.
LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans, who has been working on the collider
for 14 years, said he felt a wave of relief after the protons had
completed their first lap so smoothly.
"It's a machine of enormous complexity and things can go wrong at any
time," he said.
Messages of congratulations flooded in from CERN's partners and
rivals, including the legendary Fermilab particle physics lab near
Chicago.
The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss
francs (3.76 billion euros, 5.46 billion dollars) is one of the
costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.
When all is ready, the LHC will whizz two parallel beams, one
clockwise and the other anticlockwise, around the tunnel at up to 11,000
laps per second before steering them into collisions into four chambers
whose walls are swathed with detectors.
The first collisions are likely to start in several weeks, but only
next year will the LHC be cranked up to its full capacity of 14
teraelectronvolts a massive amount of energy or seven times the record
held by Fermilab.
Over the 10-15 years in which will the LHC will operate, masses of
data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by
physicists around the world.
"It's about acquiring knowledge for humanity about the behaviour of
fundamental matter," physicist Daniel Denegri told AFP. "We expect to
make discoveries that could be rather spectacular."
Wednesday AFP |