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"We've got a beam on the LHC." That’s what Lyn
Evans, the project leader for the Large Hadron Collider experiment managed to tell
his colleagues before they burst into a round of applause at hearing the big
news. One hour after this, scientists were celebrating the particle beam’s completion
of a clockwise trajectory of the accelerator. Collider’s first mission
successfully accomplished. Not without running into some small bumps in the
road, though.
Due to some problems with the machine’s magnets, the
Collider’s temperature, which has to be kept at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, registered
some fluctuation, delaying sending the beam in the counter-clockwise direction.
European Organization for Nuclear Research’s head of
hardware commissioning Rudiger Schmidt stated that the issue had been merely a hiccup,
having no notable impact whatsoever.
The Large
Hadron Collider experiment aims at recreating the effect of the “Big Bang,”
thus solving many a mystery about matter and elementary particles. The “Big
Bang” is a theory about the origins of the Universe revolving around the main
idea that it [the Universe] was created due to the explosion of a very hot and
dense primordial object the size of a coin 15 billion years ago. The theory was
first proposed by Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre, although the phrase “Big
Bang” is said to have been coined by Sir Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer best
known for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.
The
Collider will also look into concepts such as “dark matter,” which is
hypothetical matter whose existence can be drawn from the gravitational effects it has on visible
matter, “dark energy,” a hypothetical form of energy that increases the
Universe’s expansion rate and a theoretical particle dubbed the “God Particle,”
which could explain how particles gain mass.
The LHC
will eventually create small collisions between atoms at nearly the speed of
light, in an attempt to re-enact the “Big Bang,” although scientists have not
yet revealed when this would happen. To create such an effect, they have to
pump beams in both directions through a vacuum that is both colder and emptier
than outer space. The beams are kept on their circular trajectory by 1,232
dipole magnets, while other 392 quadrupole magnets keep them focused in order
to maximize the chances of interaction. A proton will take less than a minute
and a half to travel once around the main ring, which means 11,000 revolutions
per second.
The project, which was organized by the 20 European member
nations of CERN and involved scientists from 80 different nations( of which
1,200 researchers come from the United States), cost 10 billion Swiss franc to
start up, the entire cost of the experiment being expected to rise to a maximum
of approximately €6.4 billion.
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