Experts Celebrate First Successful LHC Test
Champagne corks popped in labs across the world as scientists celebrated the first successful run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Scientists hope the immensely complex particle-smashing machine will one day be able to recreate the conditions that caused the “Big Bang” to occur.
The debut of the machine that cost 10 billion Swiss francs ($9 billion) registered as a blip on a control room screen at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, at about 9:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. EDT).
"We’ve got a beam on the LHC," project leader Lyn Evans told his colleagues, who burst into applause at the news.
Contributing scientists from around the world watched by satellite and also erupted into applause and celebration.
"Well done everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider’s control room at the Swiss-French border.
The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons – a type of subatomic particle – around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier.
Scientists have now successfully sent beams in the clockwise direction, but now they plan to send it counterclockwise. Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light, an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is thought to have occurred 15 billion years ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in a void, spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.
Recent interest in the project has been spurred by many critics who claim the experiment could create tiny black holes that could suck in the whole planet.
"It’s nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday’s start.
CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain’s Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.
"On Wednesday we start small," said Gillies. "A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you’ve got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show-stopper."
Project leader Evans admitted he wasn’t sure how long it would take before the team could witness high-energy collisions.
"I don’t know how long it will take," he said. "I think what has happened this morning bodes very well that it will go quickly … This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning we had a great start."
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Image 1: LHC magnet: superconducting quadrupole magnet. (Courtesy of CERN)
Image 2: An aerial view of the Geneva region, showing the position of the LHC tunnel (Copyright CERN)
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