Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?
Boffins tear up schedule in race for dimensional portal
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Forging ahead much faster than had been expected, particle-smashing boffins at the Large Hadron Collider have now carried out actual collisions - blasting beams of protons into one another at a healthy 450 giga-electron-volts each for total whack of 900 GeV.
Since the mighty LHC was crippled last year in an unfortunate electro-burnout liquid helium superfluid explosion mishap, top boffins have toiled like gnomes in tunnels buried deep beneath the foundations of the Swiss alps to repair the subterranean machine. Late on Friday night their efforts bore fruit, as the first beams of hadrons circulated all the way round the colossal 27km magnetic vaccuum doughnut.
We here on the Reg particle-punisher desk relaxed a little at that point, as we had consulted this internal CERN document (pdf) - unearthed by keen amateur LHC-watcher Chris Stephens - which indicated no collisions until December 3.
Like the cynical media troublemakers we are, we had anticipated a leisurely ten days or so of pumping up public anticipation - and of course hysteria among the tinfoilclad community, many of whom are convinced that meddling LHC boffins will implode the planet in a horrendous artificial-black-hole blunder of some type, turn it into soup, or alternatively rip open a portal or gap in the very fabric of spacetime through which might come interdimensional invaders etc. All good clean fun.
But evidently the boffins at CERN, perhaps hoping to forestall the sort of attention/madness which built up last year for the first power-up - or more likely just itching to have a go with their kit - have torn up their initial plan. Twin beams have now been crossed, and collisions have been observed in the experiments - the huge underground instrument caverns which plot the sub-subatomic debris scattering in all directions when hadrons run into each other head-on at a gnat's whisker less than light speed. It is among such debris that boffins hope to spot the elusive Higgs Boson or "God particle", and so finally resolve the long-running boffinry deathmatch between Professors Higgs and Hawking.
Scientists at the LHC are naturally overjoyed at all this, and so might some of our other readers be too. Collisions have occurred, and as yet there is no sign of planetary implosion and/or soupening, nor yet any interdimensional portal invasion.
Next page: 900 GeV collisions are just hadron love-taps - when will CERN really get it on? 'This week'?
COMMENTS
obligatory quote...
Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!
Had to be done.
Dimensional portals.
I'll go buy a crow-bar.
--
We do what we must because we can.
For the good of all of us
Except the ones who are dead.
Glenn Beck
I'm not actually saying the LHC has already brought interdimensional invaders into our continuum and started raping our wives, but why won't CERN deny that it has?
There has been an awful lot of media speculation that is really damaging to CERN. I wonder why they won't just put all our minds at ease and confirm that the world has not been turned into grey goo. Of course I am not saying that it has, but they should be up-front about whether or not the unverse has been turned into strangelet soup.
Until they do, people will continue to speculate, and this can only be damaging to CERN's reputation.
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