William Atkins
Tuesday, 24 November 2009 03:44
Science -
Energy
Page 1 of 3
On Monday, November 23, 2009, the scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider circulated—for the first time—two beams simultaneously in its gigantic accelerator, giving them a chance to look for sub-particle collisions among its near-speed-of-light protons.
According to the CERN press release “
Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC,” the protons within the particle beams were circulating in opposite directions, which gave the operators of the world’s largest, most energetic, and most expensive accelerator a chance to look for collisions at two points.
The 11/23/2009 press release stated,
“From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.”
And, Rolf Heuer, who is CERN’s director general, stated,
“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time. But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”
At 2:22 p.m. local time, it was recorded that the beams within the ATLAS detector had the ability to produce collisions.
Later in the afternoon, the CMS detector had its particle beam also “tuned” for collisions.
By that evening, the ALICE detector was optimized, which was followed by the LHCb detector.
Page two highlights comments made of representatives of four of the particle detectors found on the Large Hadron Collider.
