CERN Sets Date for Record Collision in Large Hadron Collider
Email
Print
CERN readies the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for beam collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam), marking the start of the organization's physics program.
Less than a week after the Large Hadron Collider, a particle
accelerator located outside Geneva operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN),
successfully circulated two 3.5 TeV proton beams and set a record for the highest energy
yet achieved in a particle accelerator, CERN announced the date for the start
of the LHC research program. The first attempt for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV
per beam) is scheduled for March 30. A Webcast will be available on the day of the first
attempt to collide protons at 7 TeV, the organization noted.
Between now and March 30, the LHC team will be working with 3.5 TeV beams to
commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the particle
detectors from stray particles. CERN's director for accelerators and
technology, Steve Myers, said all these systems must be fully commissioned
before collisions can begin. "With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we're on the verge of
launching the LHC physics program," he said. "But we've still got a lot of work
to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: It's
a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and
getting them to collide halfway."
Once 7 TeV collisions have been established, the plan is to run continuously
for a period of 18-24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010.
CERN said this would bring enough data across all the potential
discovery areas, including basic laws governing the interactions and forces
among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and
especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
relativity. Over the 2009 part of the run, each of the LHC's four major experiments-ALICE,
ATLAS, CMS and LHCb-recorded over 1 million particle collisions.
CERN Director General Rolf Heuer warned the LHC is not a "turnkey" machine.
"The machine is working well, but we're still very much in a commissioning
phase, and we have to recognize that the first attempt to collide is precisely
that. It may take hours or even days to get collisions."
The last time CERN switched on a major new research machine, the Large Electron
Positron Collider (LEP), in 1989, it took three days from the first attempt to
collide to the first recorded collisions. The current LHC run began in November
2009, with the first circulating beam at 0.45 TeV. The organization soon began
to speed up acceleration, with twin circulating beams established by the end of
November and a world record beam energy of 1.18
TeV being set on Nov. 30.
