Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
The Large Hadron Collider is back and better than ever, delivering physics data for the first time in more than two years and doing so at record energy levels of 13 trillion electron volts, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have confirmed.
Science experiments officially resumed at the LHC on Wednesday following a 27-month period in which the particle accelerator was shut down and then re-commissioned. Nearly all of its experiments are operating at the 13 TeV energy levels, which is nearly twice the collision energy of its initial run. The LHC will now run non-stop for the next three years.
“With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning,” CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry said in a statement, calling it “a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment” for everyone who had worked on the LHC during its shutdown, powering test, and beam commissioning processes.
First “stable beams” produced
While, as The Verge noted, the LHC first began running again last month, the world’s largest particle accelerator had not produced the first “stable beams” necessary for experiments to take place until 10:40am local time on June 3. Those beams, CERN noted, are comprised of proton “trains” moving at close to the speed of light around the collider’s 27-kilometer ring.
Rolf Heuer, CERN’s outgoing director-general, congratulated the LHC team and called this a “fantastic achievement,” according to BBC News. However, he also advised people that they should not expect to see any immediate data from the experiments, cautioning that they needed to be patient because meaningful results are “not going to happen tomorrow.”
CERN did experience some issues with the particle accelerator early Wednesday morning. At one point, the protein beams were even lost. However, they were able to overcome those issues to begin the first collisions of the current run – the first since the device discovered the Higgs boson, the elementary particle which gives other particles mass.
On its first day, the LHC was filled with six proton bunches, each containing about 100 billion particles, the organization said. This rate will be progressively increased, ultimately reaching a level of 2808 bunches per beam, which will allow the particle accelerator to produce as much as one billion collisions per second at its peak.
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