I've been at CERN for the last couple of weeks for the start-up of the accelerator and this weekend we finally got the bloody thing up and running! There was alot of excitement in our experiment control room on Friday night when the beam finally came through... and again yesterday when the first collisions happened. On Friday night I think there were about 200 of us crammed in there looking at the monitors...
From todays NYTimes online:
The
Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive science experiment, produced its first collisions on Monday, said scientists at
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, outside Geneva.
Seemingly
making up for lost time after years of disasters and delays, the
collisions came only three days after engineers had begun shooting the
subatomic particles known as protons around their 17-mile underground
racetrack. The physicists announced that they had succeeded in making
the beams collide, producing what they called “candidate collision
events” in the giant particle detectors in the collider.
The
collider has been built over 15 years at a cost of $9 billion to
accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts apiece
and then slam them together in an attempt to recreate forces and
particles that reigned during the first moments of the Big Bang. But
for much of that time, the only things that have gone bang in the
collider were magnets and other components, most notably in September
2008 after the first time protons circled the collider.
When the
beams began circulating again on Friday, CERN officials said they
expected the first collisions to happen in early December.
“It’s
a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” CERN’s
director general, Rolf Heuer, said in a news release. “But we need to
keep a sense of perspective — there’s still much to do before we can
start the L.H.C. physics program.”
In the control rooms of the
collider and of the four giant particle detectors, built and staffed by
thousands of physicists who have the job of interpreting the data from
the beginning of time, there were cheers and Champagne.
Michael Tuts of
Columbia University
said he and his colleagues were “ecstatic at the news.” But the most
important scientific results from the collider are still far in the
future, scientists said.
Monday’s collisions were basically a
test of the collider systems’ ability to synchronize the beams, in
which bunches of protons travel along at nearly the speed of light, and
make them collide at the right points. The protons were at their
so-called injection energies of 450 billion electron volts, a far cry
from the energies the machine will eventually achieve.
In the
next weeks before a holiday break, CERN hopes to increase the proton
energies to 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece, which would make the
hadron collider officially the most powerful in the world, eclipsing
the Tevatron (900 billion electron volts) at Fermilab in Illinois.
Early next year the first runs devoted to physics research will start
at 3.5 trillion electron volts — half the original design energy. To
get near 7 trillion electron volts, the engineers say, the machine will
have to be shut down a year from now for a lengthy period of repairs
and other work.