Atom smasher starts speeding proton beams
ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, The Associated Press
Posted on Wednesday, November 25 @ 04:09:00 CST
Topic: Great Big World |   GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher used its accelerator Tuesday to speed up proton beams for the first time as scientists moved ahead in efforts to learn more about the universe.
The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider showed it could raise the energy of the proton beams whizzing around the massive machine by an initial 20 percent.
"It was just a preliminary test," said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. "It's all going very well."
Tuesday's step indicated further good news for the collider since months of repairs following its spectacular collapse last year. The latest phase began Friday night when the first proton beams circulated each way around the 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
The operators then got the beams to run simultaneously in opposite directions through fire-hose-sized pipes 11,000 times a second around the ring, zooming by at nearly the speed of light through temperatures colder than outer space.
Ultimately, the collider aims to create conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.
On Monday, the collider's four massive detectors saw the first collisions between protons as the beams crossed each other at set points in rooms the size of cathedrals 100 meters (300 feet) underground.
Physicists say the beam is of superb quality, with the protons tightly packed into hairlike lines and guided by 1,600 superconducting magnets — some of them 15 meters (50 feet) long — around the ring.
While the initial collisions were a side effect, intentional hits could begin within the next 10 days, mainly to check how the machine is working, Gillies said. The initial collisions are needed to calibrate the machine.
Gillies said Tuesday the energy of the proton beam was increased to 540 from 450 billion electron volts, still a long way from the power that will be needed for new discoveries in the makeup of the universe and matter. Those discoveries might start happening in the first half of next year.
"They set in process the procedure to ramp the machine up to the 1.2 TeV (trillion electron volts) that we want to get to this year," Gillies said.
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