The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, is to start its delayed high-energy operation to hunt for the “God Particle” on Tuesday.
By Aislinn Laing
Telegraph UK
Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern), which operates the £5bn atom-smasher on the Franco-Swiss border, are expected to restart high-energy operations on Tuesday morning.
Their aim is to steer speeding atomic particles into head-on collisions in a bid to mimic the conditions seen moments after the Big Bang.
Physicists also hope it will ultimately allow them to find the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that theoretically gives mass to other subatomic particles, and thus everything in the universe.
The collider was first launched in September 2008 amid an international fanfare that saw the world’s media invited to make sense of the epic experiment, conducted in a 16.8 mile (27km) tunnel 320ft below ground.
But just nine days after the launch, the machine suffered a spectacular failure from a bad electrical connection and 53 of its superconducting magnets – some 50ft long – had to be replaced.
Designed to collide two, seven electron volt (TeV) beams of protons, the LHC can still only run at half power until 2011 because of the problems. It will then close for a year of further engineering work so that it can run at full power again in 2013.
In November, the LHC produced its first proton collisions, breaking the record held by the US Tevatron collider near Chicago, when it smashed together protons at an energy of 2.36 electron volts (TeV).
Last week, two beams were circulated to new record speeds of 3.5tn TeV and on Tuesday, they will be crossed for the first time.