The LHC experiments and the preaccelerators. T...Image via Wikipedia

What happened yesterday when Cern switched on the Large Hadron Collider? Scientists accelerated protons - the nuclei of hydrogen atoms - into the LHC’s 27km underground ring for the first time. In the morning the particles travelled clockwise around the $8bn circular track, almost at the speed of light, guided by superconducting magnets. Another proton beam made an anticlockwise trip in the afternoon.

We’ve been told the LHC will give us new insights into the secrets of the universe. When can we expect to see these scientific results? The real experimentation will start in a few weeks, after Cern engineers have finetuned the accelerator.

Then they will propel proton beams in opposite directions and smash them together - producing intense concentrations of energy that mimic on a microscopic scale conditions in the newborn universe.

But it may take months after the first collisions for physicists to begin to make sense of the subatomic particles produced in the collisions. Thousands of researchers worldwide will be analysing terabytes of data from the LHC’s four giant particle detectors.

What are they expecting to find? The most widely anticipated discovery is the Higgs boson, the particle proposed in the 1960s by Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University as a mechanism by which matter can acquire mass. If it does not emerge at the energy levels of LHC collisions, theoreticians will have to rewrite the socalled standard model that they have drawn up over the past 40 years as a partial explanation for the forces and particles in the universe.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Add this article to: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • StumbleUpon
  • bodytext
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • TwitThis
  • del.icio.us
  • Live
  • Technorati