The LHC breaks the world record for proton acceleration previously held by the Tevatron Collider in the United States.
Artwork by Rachel Wilson
The LHC is the world’s largest atom smasher. It is located inside a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border and cost about $10 billion to construct. Last year, however, the LHC endured a spectacular collapse and was undergoing repairs until just recently. The collider was started with great demonstration September 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It took 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted. The overall price of repairs and improvements is expected to cost $40 million.
However, what many people don’t understand is why the world needs such a large and expensive machine that just smashes atoms together. Ultimately, the goal of this machine is to recreate conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang (a theory of how the universe was created billions of years ago). After all, who doesn’t want to know how the ground they walk on got there? Physicists also hope that the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, anti-matter, and super symmetry. TJ Physics teacher, Nelson Vore, said, “The LHC will allow physicists to see parts of the universe never seen before. Whenever you get the first look at something for the first time often all sorts of huge revolutionary discoveries are made. It is comparable to Galileo being the first human to ever look at the night sky with a good telescope.”
On Monday, November 30th, the LHC became the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, accelerating its twin beams of protons to an energy level of 1.18TeV (trillion electron volts). This breaks the previous record held by the Tevatron Collider, which operates at 0.98TeV and is located in the Fermilab near Chicago. One TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito, but it becomes extremely significant in the submicroscopic collisions of the collider. Also, the LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows the superconducting magnets in the machine to guide the protons more efficiently.
The LHC was restarted only ten days before breaking the record. The first beams were injected into the machine on Friday, November 20th, and two beams were circulated together for the first time on Monday, November 23rd. The organization hopes the next major step will be to collide the proton beams at about 1.2 TeV before Christmas for an initial look at the tiny particles and what forces might be created.
Even though breaking this record is an important step for the LHC, the level reached Monday isn’t significantly higher than what Fermilab has been doing, and real advances are not expected until the LHC raises each beam to 3.5 TeV during the first half of next year.
This could mean huge things for the scientific community of the world. Since the universe is so inconceivably massive, it is impossible for us Earthlings to explore it physically. However, one of the collider’s many expected accomplishments is to create tiny black holes that scientists can study up close. Even the most ingenius physicists have a hard time describing a black hole, but pretty much it is a “thing” in space that has no mass, but infinite density and infinite gravitational pull, so anything that goes near one gets sucked in and can never come out, and no one knows where black holes lead. This is an amazing start for the LHC and means that discovering the mysteries of the universe may be upon us in the near future.
