CERN scientists jubilant over restart of particle collider

The experiment of the century is back in business – without a hitch so far.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are exulting in the successful resumption of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at its Geneva research facility.

On Friday evening, CERN announced that it successfully fired a clockwise circulating beam of particles in the LHC, using an accelerator in a 26-kilometre circular tunnel, 100 metres beneath the French-Swiss border.
A second anti-clockwise beam made a full circle of the LHC shortly before midnight.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN director general Rolf Heuer in a statement. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC projects aims to smash sub-atomic particles together in a bid to recreate the same conditions that occurred after the BIg Bang origins of the universe, with an array of sophisticated machines in place to analyze what happens.

The goal is to find out more about the makeup of matter.

Scientists from all over the world –some of whom have been collaborating on the CERN experiement for decades - were encouraged by the re-launch of the collider, after an electrical malfunction derailed the project in September, 2008.

Andy Parker, Cambridge University professor of high energy physics, started collaborating on the LHC project in 1989. So when the go-ahead was given for the first proton beam on Friday evening, he experienced a career high.

Watching the live feed while talking to Swisster on Friday evening, he noted the moment just after 6 pm when machine operators received the green light to begin circulating the first beam.

Parker, who has written over 100 publications on aspects of particle physics, said he would be celebrating the event by opening a bottle of ‘atom smasher’ labelled beer, which he had been saving especially for the occasion.

“It’s been a Herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers.

One of the striking things about this project is the depth of international collaboration, which has brought the world’s top physicists to Switzerland.

Professor Dejan Stojkovic of New York State University (SUNY) at Buffalo told Swisster he and his research team were celebrating over the weekend.

Stojkovic is the co-creator of the Black Max computer simulator, which stimulates the production of black holes in the collider and calculates their properties.

Fourteen months ago electrical problems caused an explosion which halted the project and damaged equipment that cost at least 40 million francs to fix.

After more than a year of repairs and recalibrations, technicians first injected particles on October 23 and a stationary beam was steered through the machine on November 7.

Stojkovic says scientists have learned a lesson from last year. This time they are ramping up the amount of energy used to fire the particles more slowly than in 2008 in a bid to avoid another explosion.

The next important milestone  will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now.

These will give scientists their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. Scientists will boost the beams to high energy in preparation for collisions at seven trillion electric volts (TeV) in January.

At 8am on Monday morning, scientists had not yet reached the record of 1.2 TeV.

A key goal for the machine is to look for a particle called the Higgs boson, regarded as a key piece of the puzzle about the composition of matter.

But scientists are urging the public not to expect too much too soon. Professor Stojkovic told Swisster that he was “cautiously optimistic” about “the most complex machine that humans have ever built . . . I don’t expect we are going to get final answers - we are going to get hints.”

Another challenge for CERN is to explain to the world the complex science in the underground machine, which is expected to remain operational for a decade.

Parker reckoned a “successful run” with the LHC will be “a very powerful force” for generating further public interest in the subject, and filling university places in particle physics courses.

Already, he said, it is a rare day when he doesn’t fill a lecture theatre for one of his high energy science talks.

Stojkovic, who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, said that folks in the US are less interested than Europeans in particle physics.

Work began on a superconducting super collider in Texas, that would have been bigger than the LHC, but the US Congress cancelled the project in 1993 Congress after costs soared and questions were raised about its scientific value.

CERN member governments, including Switzerland, have so far invested an estimated 10 billion francs in the LHC project.

On Monday morning CERN’s tweet platform had 35,000 followers. A press conference will be held at CERN, at the Globe of Science and Innovation, at 2pm on Monday, webcast at: http://webcast.cern.ch/.