Burst of energy on frontier of physics
There are 27 kilometres of tunnels, 6000 scientists and billions of dollars’ worth of cutting-edge scientific kit, and yesterday they all came together at Cern to produce the strongest beams the particle accelerator has recorded.
Or, put another way, to create a series of collisions with an energy roughly equivalent to two mosquitoes bumping into each other.
After a two-year hiatus and several months of testing, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is up and running again, at twice the energy that helped it to find the Higgs boson in July 2012.
The first three-year run of the Large Hadron Collider ‘‘was only the start of our journey’’, said Rolf Heuer, the director-general of Cern, greeting the successful tests.
‘‘It is time for new physics. We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.’’
After the discovery of the Higgs in 2012, the Geneva-based accelerator was shut down for maintenance and an upgrade. Yesterday’s successful collisions mean that its Large Hadron Collider is now working at its maximum design capacity, and while the actual energies seem small, they are huge given the size of the particles involved.
Each of the beams produced yesterday contained tens of billions of protons that were accelerated to near the speed of light to meet at an energy level of 13 teraelectronvolts – or twice the energy they had before shutdown.
Cern’s Large Hadron Collider will now run continuously for the next three years, at the end of which its scientists hope to have spotted physical processes and particles never before observed, and in doing so gain an insight into some of the biggest mysteries of science – such as the existence of ‘‘dark matter’’.
Antonella De Santo, part of the Atlas collaboration and a member of the University of Sussex, said she was awaiting the results with excitement.
‘‘The Large Hadron Collider has broken yet another record and is now colliding beams at unprecedented high energies,’’ De Santo said.
‘‘This opens up a whole new frontier for physics exploration.
‘‘At the new energies we hope to unearth evidence of new physics phenomena that have never been observed before and which could change our understanding of how our universe works.’’