The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.
In the early hours of Monday morning, the LHC accelerated protons to a record-breaking 1.18 TeV (tera-electronvolts). The previous record sat at 0.98 TeV and was achieved by Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois back in 2001.
A "tera-electronvolt" (or a million million electronvolts) is a unit of kinetic energy; as the velocity of protons are pushed to higher (relativistic) speeds, their kinetic energy increases. Therefore, the LHC has also broken the land speed record for accelerator protons.
"A new record. Both beams in LHC reach 1.18 TeV at 00:42 on 30 November." --@CERN via Twitter
This amazing achievement comes hot on the heels of the first circulation of protons around the circular collider on Nov. 20 and then the surprise announcement that the first low energy collisions had been carried out weeks earlier than expected.
"We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer today. "However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then."
Now that this record-breaking energy has been accomplished, proton velocities (and therefore energy) will continue to be ramped up and further calibration collisions can be expected.
Calibration collisions are being carried out to make sure all the particle detectors are working correctly and the collision events are being correctly characterized. This is a key concern for detector physicists, it's all very well accelerating the particles, but it would be a shame if CERN couldn't detect the resulting particles.
"We're sweating that our detectors can actually see the data," Prof Jonathan Butterworth, a physicist working on the ATLAS detector, told Discovery News. "Would be pretty poor if the LHC gave us collisions and we missed them."
Eventually, once all the systems check out, physicists will see what the LHC can really do as they crank up proton energies closer and closer to the target 7 TeV. At these energies, the conditions shortly after the Big Bang may be recreated and free particles the universe hasn't seen for 13.73 billion years will be produced. It is hoped that the confirmation (or non-confirmation) of the Higgs boson will be achieved at these high collision energies. Also, more exotic phenomena may be generated, such as short-lived micro-black holes (a simulation of which is shown in the image above).
Once these calibration runs are completed we can look forward to high-energy collisions through 2010 and the disastrous "quench" of September 2008 (which leaked tons of liquid hydrogen coolant and damaged several sensitive electromagnets) will be nothing more than a dim memory.
Image: Simulation of a micro-black hole event in the ATLAS detector of the LHC (ATLAS/LHC/CERN)
Sources: CMS, Wired, US/LHC Blogs
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