IT TOOK 20 years, €4 billion and the work of 10,000 scientists, but the effort has finally delivered. The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom smasher ever built, is up, running and producing data.
It happened at 12.06pm Irish time yesterday, after more than four hours of tinkering to get the 27km-long behemoth working. But after all the years and all the effort, at that precise time high energy collisions began to occur, providing what the scientists describe as the “first physics” from the machine.
“We are very excited, it is a fantastic result for science,” said Dr Rolf Heuer, director general of the European Nuclear Research Centre, Cern, which operates the collider. “It is a great day to be a particle physicist.”
The huge collider uses powerful electromagnets to send twin beams of atomic particles, protons, spinning in opposite directions around the giant 27km underground ring. On command these proton beams, travelling at close to the speed of light, are allowed to cross, causing high-energy collisions that emit huge energies.
Dr Steve Myers, an Irish scientist from Belfast who is in charge of the collider and other particle accelerators at Cern, is hugely relieved at the success. “We have finally got the beams into collisions. I think we are all happy, all emotional,” he said only minutes after the first collisions began.
Scientists use large colliders or particle accelerators in experiments designed to help explain the nature of matter. Large particles such as protons break down into smaller components in these collisions.
There are four sensitive detectors placed around the ring, and these record the smaller components kicked out by the collisions, measuring their energies and gleaning details about them.
One detector, the LHCb, has significant Irish involvement. Parts of the device were built at University College Dublin before being installed at Cern.
The control rooms for all four experiments were packed as the countdown to collisions progressed. Cheers and applause broke out when the beams were crossed and collision data began showing up on computer screens.
“People are going mad in here,” said Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool, who collaborates on the LHCb detector. “It was amazing, it really was.”
Champagne was quickly opened and poured out into plastic cups. The scientists toasted one another, cheering periodically as new data began coming in from the detectors.
Three Irish PhD students, James Keaveney, Dermot Moran and Stephen Farey are part of the LHCb group and were on hand to enjoy the atmosphere. “It is a real pinch-yourself moment to realise what you are doing,” said Mr Keaveney.
“It has been a day of excitement and a new beginning. We finally have some data to chew on.”
The collider’s importance does not just stem from the fact it can deliver collisions – rather it comes from the tremendous energies it can produce while doing so. These high energies mimic those which occurred at the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, so these experiments inform our understanding of the nature of the cosmos.
- Twitter--@dickahlstrom