Early this morning, two proton beams collided in the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile-long ring at a combined energy of 7 TeV, three times higher than ever before. Finally, the flood of data particle physicists have been anticipating for years for has begun.
"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," said General Rolf Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is located, in a press release Tuesday. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."
Getting the LHC started has not been easy. In September 2008 as it was first turned on, physicists around the world celebrated like never before. Just a week later when the LHC suffered a mechanical failure, it silenced the cheering abruptly like a visiting team hushing the home crowd with a buzzer-beating three-pointer.
Several more setbacks pushed the restart back a full year, and when the machine was turned on again, the celebration was more subdued, and until today, the physics world hadn't fully exhaled. The first page of the first chapter has finally been turned.
"With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore," said physicist Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment on the LHC. "The hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson."
It remains to be seen how quickly the new machine will begin picking off its prey, however. Catching something as mysterious, elusive and possibly nonexistent as the Higgs boson takes more than just high energy. The beams must be calibrated, and recalibrated and tamed into submission. Scientists must get to know the LHC's typical data output before they can successfully find the anamolies that will be evidence of yet unknown particles and phenomena.
In the meantime, physicists continue to work on the well-oiled, well-understood Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The LHC's shadow has been lurking ever closer to the previous world-record holder for the highest energy, but the delayed start and slower ramp-up time put the Tevatron scientists into an unexpected overtime period, and they have continued to work hard chasing results -- the Higgs boson in particular.
The LHC will run at its current energy for a year and a half, if all goes well. At this point, physicists expect it will have essentially caught up with the Tevatron, and the race will be over. Regardless of whether it has captured the Higgs boson by then, the Tevatron will be benched indefinitely, and the LHC will take a time out for maintenance and then ramp up to its combined collision energy target of 14 TeV.
Image: CERN
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