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World’s biggest atom-smasher starts operations

Particle physicists were jubilant yesterday after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first test with flying colors.

Cheers, applause and the pop of a champagne cork — rather than the cataclysmic suck of a black hole, as doomsayers had feared — marked the breakthrough at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

CERN director general Robert Aymar hailed it as a “historic day” for the organization and humankind’s thirst for knowledge.

Humans have “a quest for [knowing] where they came from and where they should go, whether the universe will end, and where the universe will go in the future,” he said.

Just after 7:30am, the first proton beam was injected into the Large Hadron Collider, built 100m underground at CERN headquarter.

The mission aims to resolve some of the greatest enigmas in physics: whether a so-called “God particle” exists that would account for the nature of mass; an explanation for “dark matter” and “dark energy” that account for 96 percent of the cosmos; and whether other dimensions exist in parallel to our own.

In a 27km circular tunnel on the Swiss-French border, parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the “Big Bang” that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Arrays of detectors will trace the sub-atomic rubble spewed out from the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.

CERN scientists have dismissed fears that the process could create a “black hole,” whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth.

Yesterday’s startup marked the start of a long and cautious commissioning process to check equipment and operational procedures before these collisions can get under way.

The first batch of protons was halted, sector by sector, to verify that monitoring systems and the steering magnets were working properly. Their speed was purposely slowed for the inspection process.

The clockwise beam completed this first test lap in under an hour, causing an eruption of joy and an outbreak of bubbly in the control room.

“No one would have imagined that this could have been done in less than an hour. It’s phenomonenal, quite unbelievable,” an operator said.

“We are very happy and proud,” the operator said.

By comparison, the predecessor to the LHC at CERN, the Large Electron Positron collider, took 12 hours to achieve the same goal.

A test of the anticlockwise beam was to take place later yesterday, scientists said.
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