After two years of renovations and reengineering and a few technical delays, CERN’s Larch Hadron Collider (LHC) is back up and running with the hope of providing insight into events in the first few seconds following the Big Bang.
The LHC fired its first proton beam at 10:41 am Geneva time this morning. The first shot to travel through the 17 mile long ring achieved an energy level of GeV, but the team at CERN hopes to achieve collisions at 13 TeV when the LHC is fully operational.
To give you an idea of the power that represents, a 9 volt battery releases a charge of 9 electron volts (eV). A collision between the two sides of the battery would achieve 18 ev. Physicists hope that to release particles at 6.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) achieving collision speeds of 13 TeV. Particle collisions at that speed probably would have been frequent in the milliseconds following the Big Bang.
By observing how particles behave under such circumstances, physicists hope to unravel mysteries about how the universe formed and continues to function.
“The return of beams to the LHC rewards a lot of intense, hard work from many teams of people. It’s very satisfying for our operators to be back in the driver’s seat, with what’s effectively a new accelerator to bring on-stream, carefully, step by step,” said Head of CERN’s Beam Department, Paul Collier in a statement.
According to CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) during the past two years; 10,000 electrical interconnections were made between magnets, magnet protection systems were added, vacuum, electronic and cryogenic systems were improved and beams were improved to produce more collisions.
“After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape. But the most important step is still to come when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels,” said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry.
During its previous run, the LHC was used to find the Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God Particle’, which is believed to be a fundamental building block of the universe and responsible for all matter with mass. The Higgs boson remained elusive for a very long time because it exists for only 0.000000000000000000000001 of a second.
One of the many things that the LHC will explore in its current run is dark matter. Scientists know that dark matter exists and makes up the majority of matter in the universe based on its gravitational effect on other objects but know very little about it other than that.
Dark matter cannot be seen or observed in any way currently available to us, hence the name. It recently became even more mysterious. An international team of researchers observed galactic collisions to see what happened when large amounts of dark matter collided with other large collections of dark matter and the answer was ‘nothing at all‘.
Masses of dark matter passed through other masses of dark matter as if it wasn’t there at all. Several experiments scheduled for the LHC could shed light on what, exactly, dark matter is and how it came to be.
Obviously knowing more about the stuff that makes up most of the universe, could dramatically improve physicists understanding of how the universe works on a number of levels.
According to CERN, quark-gluon plasma, the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, and antimatter also high on the agenda for the LHC’s second run.
Over the last two years, 10,000 people from 113 countries were involved in the upgrades and reengineering of the LHC.
A live blog of today’s first run, along with video interviews with some key researchers is available on the CERN website.
