Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
The Large Hadron Collider is in the bullpen, warming up and getting ready to get back into the game, as the massive particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland has smashed particles together for the first time since restarting last month.
According to BBC News, the low-energy collisions took place on Tuesday morning and were part of the LHC team’s ongoing preparations for its upcoming round of experiments. Beams of protons circled around the unit and collided at an energy of 450 gigaelectronvolts per beam.
The LHC, which is operated by physicists with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and is best known for discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, will operate at energy levels nearly twice its previous run with the hopes that it will lead to new discoveries that go beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, the British media outlet added.
On Easter Sunday, CERN reportedly achieved an important milestone when proton beams were able to do full circuits of the LHC’s 27km subterranean circle. On Tuesday, the two beams were directed into each other, bringing the collider one step closer to a fully-functional restart.
Preparing for actual, experimental collisions this summer
After its first run, the particle accelerator was shut down for two years while officials at CERN repaired and improved it. During its second run, the plan is for it to stage collisions at 7,000 GeV per beam, BBC News said, but there is still work to be done before that can happen.
The first collisions at those energy levels are currently scheduled to begin on June 1, but those will be used for calibration. Collisions that provide usable data are scheduled to start later on in the summer. Professor Tara Shears from the University of Liverpool, who works on one of the LHC experiments, said that “physics collisions” at the collider “are close.”
Shears added that even though they are occurring at injection energy (meaning the LHC itself is not adding any acceleration to the particles), these early collisions are important because the data will be used to fine-tune experiments and make sure that the subdetectors “are time aligned with each other.” She added that the team has “a shopping list of checks to do.”
Those checks, she told the BBC, include “checking the trigger, our luminosity calculation, [and] the performance of each part of our experiment,” Shears said that she and her colleagues would “work through this with these collision runs.” As for Tuesday’s initial collisions, a set of images released afterwards revealed the paths taken by debris produced by the protons.
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