The world's largest atom smasher's first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border. Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.
"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.
One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing raucous applause.
"First of all, I didn't believe it," said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.
"I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!"
"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly," said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.
Birth of the Universe
The collider "was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Tuesday. "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
"It's difficult to realize that the machine, at last, is starting now," he added. (See photos of the collider.) By creating hundreds of thousands of head-on collisions each second, physicists hope to understand the fiery conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang. The findings could also help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as the existence of one long-hypothesized particle called the Higgs boson—or the "God particle"—thought to be responsible for giving all other particles their mass.
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border. Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.
"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.
One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing raucous applause.
"First of all, I didn't believe it," said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.
"I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!"
"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly," said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.
Birth of the Universe
The collider "was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Tuesday. "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
"It's difficult to realize that the machine, at last, is starting now," he added. (See photos of the collider.) By creating hundreds of thousands of head-on collisions each second, physicists hope to understand the fiery conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang. The findings could also help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as the existence of one long-hypothesized particle called the Higgs boson—or the "God particle"—thought to be responsible for giving all other particles their mass.
No comments:
Post a Comment