Scientists switched on the world’s largest atom smasher on Friday night for the first time since the US$10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago.
It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late on Friday in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.
Circulation of the beams was a significant leap forward. The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.
Progress on restarting the machine, on the border between Switzerland and France, went faster than expected on Friday evening and the first beam started circulating in a clockwise direction around the machine about 10pm, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
“Some of the scientists had gone home and had to be called back in,” Gillies said.
The exact time of the start of the Large Hadron Collider was difficult to predict because it was based on how long it took to perform steps along the way, and in the end it happened about nine hours earlier than expected, Gillies said.
This is an important milestone on the road toward scientific at the LHC, which are expected next year, he said.
The scientists have started preparing to circulate another beam in the opposite direction within the coming hours, Gillies said.
“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer said. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”
With great fanfare, CERN circulated its first beams Sept. 10 last year. But the machine was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to massive superconducting magnets and other parts of the collider, in a 27km circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
CERN spent US$40 million on repairs and improvements on the machine to avoid a repetition.
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