Large Hadron Collider to start up at half power

William Atkins
Saturday, 08 August 2009 18:33

Science - Energy

CERN announces that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start up in November 2009 at about 3.5 teraelectron-volt (TeV), well off its top energy level but at least it will allow scientists to use the world’s largest particle accelerator/collider.


Rolf Heuer, CERN’s director general, stated in the August 6, 2009 CERN news brief LHC to run at 3.5 TeV for early part of 2009-2010 run rising later: “We've selected 3.5 TeV to start because it allows the LHC operators to gain experience of running the machine safely while opening up a new discovery region for the experiments.”

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has indicated that electrical-connections testing for the LHC is complete as of the week before August 6th.

The testing showed that further repairs were not necessary and it was safe to proceed with the start up of the world’s largest particle accelerator/collider.

It is estimated that $38 million of repairs have been performed on the $10-billion LHC since September 19, 2008.

One teraelectron-volt equals 1.60217646 × 10^-7 joules, and one TeV equals one trillion electron volts. Onee electron volt is defined as the energy gained by an electron moving through a voltage difference of one volt.

The 3.5 TeV amount is about half-power for the LHC. However, even at this level it will still be more powerful than any other particle accelerator in the world.

The LHC is intented to collide opposing particle beams (coming at each other for opposite directions) of either protons (at an energy level of 7 TeV per particle) or lead nuclei (at an energy level of 574 TeV per nucleus).

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