THE WORLD’S most powerful atom smasher could be in operation before Christmas.
Irish researchers from University College Dublin are already in place at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) near Geneva as scientists gear up for the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Cern staff have almost returned to the point where the LHC was in September 2008 when, in the glare of the world’s media, the highly complex €4 billion machine spectacularly broke down.
The LHC is a 27km-long circular tube built into a tunnel under the Jura Mountains on the Swiss-French border. It sends beams of broken-up atoms around the ring in opposite directions at almost the speed of light and collides them to release huge energies.
The smallest particles used release so much energy due to their speed.
The effect is like that of two locomotives smashing head on, but releasing all the energy at a point thousands of times smaller than the head of a pin.
“It would be a great Christmas present” to get collisions in December, said UCD’s Dr Ronan McNulty, who heads its high energy particle physics group. Dr McNulty has four Irish PhD students at Cern.
