Geneva, Switzerland – On Tuesday CERN announced in a press release that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) successfully produced collisions between two particle beams using higher energies than any ever used before in a particle accelerator.
Impacting at 7 TeV (Teraelectronvolts or trillion electron volts), the proton beams set a new record, using energies approximately three and a half times higher than any accelerator has created previously, the press release from the agency noted. (For an animation of the event, please click here).
When at its peak level of operation, the Large Hadron Collider will achieve energies of up to twice this amount.
One of the primary goals of the LHC is to experimentally discover or disprove the existence of a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson. This particle will help explain why some particles have mass while others do not. Although previous accelerators did not provide the energy needed to discover the Higgs boson, according to theory the LHC should be able to achieve the needed energy levels. Other areas of discovery and understanding expected concern the understanding of dark matter and a greater understanding of the unification of forces in the universe.
Fabiola Gianotti, who is the ATLAS collaboration spokesperson stated, “With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson.”
Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of the CMS experiment remarked, “We’ve all been impressed with the way the LHC has performed so far, and it’s particularly gratifying to see how well our particle detectors are working while our physics teams worldwide are already analyzing data. We’ll address soon some of the major puzzles of modern physics like the origin of mass, the grand unification of forces and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe. I expect very exciting times in front of us.”
Meanwhile, ALICE spokesperson Jürgen Schukraft said of start of the research program, “This is the moment we have been waiting and preparing for. We're very much looking forward to the results from proton collisions, and later this year from lead-ion collisions, to give us new insights into the nature of the strong interaction and the evolution of matter in the early Universe.”
ATLAS, ALICE, and CMS are a few of several different experiments and detectors involved with the Large Hadron Collider.
According to CERN’s press release from Tuesday,
“CERN will run the LHC for 18-24 months with the objective of delivering enough data to the experiments to make significant advances across a wide range of physics channels. As soon as they have "re-discovered" the known Standard Model particles, a necessary precursor to looking for new physics, the LHC experiments will start the systematic search for the Higgs boson. With the amount of data expected, called one inverse femtobarn by physicists, the combined analysis of ATLAS and CMS will be able to explore a wide mass range, and there’s even a chance of discovery if the Higgs has a mass near 160 GeV. If it’s much lighter or very heavy, it will be harder to find in this first LHC run.”
Concerning the initial results as well as what is to come from the LHC experiments, CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said, “It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”
As stated on its website, “CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.”
http://www.examiner.com/x-27431-Wor...tiers-of-physics-with-recordsetting-collision
Impacting at 7 TeV (Teraelectronvolts or trillion electron volts), the proton beams set a new record, using energies approximately three and a half times higher than any accelerator has created previously, the press release from the agency noted. (For an animation of the event, please click here).
When at its peak level of operation, the Large Hadron Collider will achieve energies of up to twice this amount.
One of the primary goals of the LHC is to experimentally discover or disprove the existence of a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson. This particle will help explain why some particles have mass while others do not. Although previous accelerators did not provide the energy needed to discover the Higgs boson, according to theory the LHC should be able to achieve the needed energy levels. Other areas of discovery and understanding expected concern the understanding of dark matter and a greater understanding of the unification of forces in the universe.
Fabiola Gianotti, who is the ATLAS collaboration spokesperson stated, “With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson.”
Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of the CMS experiment remarked, “We’ve all been impressed with the way the LHC has performed so far, and it’s particularly gratifying to see how well our particle detectors are working while our physics teams worldwide are already analyzing data. We’ll address soon some of the major puzzles of modern physics like the origin of mass, the grand unification of forces and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe. I expect very exciting times in front of us.”
Meanwhile, ALICE spokesperson Jürgen Schukraft said of start of the research program, “This is the moment we have been waiting and preparing for. We're very much looking forward to the results from proton collisions, and later this year from lead-ion collisions, to give us new insights into the nature of the strong interaction and the evolution of matter in the early Universe.”
ATLAS, ALICE, and CMS are a few of several different experiments and detectors involved with the Large Hadron Collider.
According to CERN’s press release from Tuesday,
“CERN will run the LHC for 18-24 months with the objective of delivering enough data to the experiments to make significant advances across a wide range of physics channels. As soon as they have "re-discovered" the known Standard Model particles, a necessary precursor to looking for new physics, the LHC experiments will start the systematic search for the Higgs boson. With the amount of data expected, called one inverse femtobarn by physicists, the combined analysis of ATLAS and CMS will be able to explore a wide mass range, and there’s even a chance of discovery if the Higgs has a mass near 160 GeV. If it’s much lighter or very heavy, it will be harder to find in this first LHC run.”
Concerning the initial results as well as what is to come from the LHC experiments, CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said, “It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”
As stated on its website, “CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.”
http://www.examiner.com/x-27431-Wor...tiers-of-physics-with-recordsetting-collision