Big success at Large Hadron Collider

By William Atkins
Sunday, 22 November 2009 18:50

Science - Energy

After a delay of over a year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the massive underground particle accelerator, beginning on November 20, 2009, is already sending particles beams on paths within the circular, underground chamber.


The world’s largest particle accelerator was restarted on Friday, November 20, 2009, several hours ahead of schedule.

It is now at a point beyond where it was in 2008 when it had to be shut down due to electrical connection problems, after being started on September 10.

Specifically, a poorly soldered electrical splice overheated, which then lead to a series of problems that damaged 53 of 1,624 magnets and other parts within the collider.

Steve Myers, the Director for Accelerators at CERN, stated, "We are further advanced now than where we were after five days of experiment last year.” [Reuters: “’Big Bang’ experiment advancing fast”]

The Reuters article calls it a "Big Bang" experiment because LHC scientists hope to recreate the mysterious conditions near the time of the Big Bang, or the time when the universe was first created about 13.7 billion years ago.

This will happen when two beams of protons (going in opposite directions) are collided with one another inside the 27-kilometer (17-mile) long circular tunnel, under the border between France and Switzerland, near Geneva, Switzerland.

The CERN organization (which is short for European Organisation for Nuclear Research), have spent the last year or so fixing the problems that resulted from the first time the US$10 billion accelerator was turned on, along with upgrading instruments and computer software.

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