Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/24/lhc_tears_up_schedule/

Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?

Boffins tear up schedule in race for dimensional portal

By Lewis Page

Posted in Science, 24th November 2009 11:04 GMT

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.

900 GeV collisions are just hadron love-taps - when will CERN really get it on? 'This week'?

Far be it from us* to irresponsibly keep on stirring the pot of comedy paranoia on this one. But it's not time for those who fear the LHC to relax just yet. Mere 450 GeV beams and 900 GeV collisions are nothing: such particle smashups have long been on offer at the rival US Tevatron, and nothing untoward has resulted.

But LHC chiefs hope soon to turn up the Big Knob to no less than 3500 GeV, more than tripling the current awesomeness and providing truly spectacular proton pileups of violence never yet created in any atomsmasher. There is some worry that the machine may explode again if cranked up beyond that point, but if all goes well boffins may gingerly try turning it up even further to a truly shattering 5000 GeV.

Following additional mods and repairs next year, still more outrageous energies of 7000 GeV are planned for 2011, at which point hadrons will be ploughing into one another beneath Geneva with stupendous 14,000 GeV violence not seen since since the era immediately after the Big Bang**.

Given that the chiefs at CERN have shown themselves more than willing to deviate from their schedule with great suddenness, it's impossible to say how soon they might start breaking records on the LHC. Stephens, for one, monitoring events more or less round the clock from Arizona, speculates that all previous collision energies may be left behind very soon indeed.

I am going to GUESS. I cant see any reason to keep them from going to 1.2 TeV (higher power) and then doing more collisions..

The whole machine is working perfectly. I cant imagine a reason to stay at 450 GeV (low power)...

They could literally do a few mouse clicks [what? no Big Knob?] and in a few minutes be at higher powers.

So I think its very possible we will have higher power and maybe collisions this week.

Stephens has thus far proven himself a far more reliable source than the CERN press office and official annoucements, so his best guess might be worth considering.

We would note, however, that the end-of-world predictions are lunatic-fringe stuff, adhered to only by eccentrics. The genuine eye-popper to be expected from the LHC - and this is according to no less a boffin than Sergio Bertolucci, one of the biggest wigs of CERN - is a dimensional portal event of some kind. Bertolucci's calculations indicate that the portal would be inconceivably small and only open for a subinstantaneously minuscule interval: but it would require no more than a few dozen zeroes to have been dropped for a proper rent-in-the-very-fabric-of-spacetime type of occurrence.

We say: Go, boffins, go! Let's see what this baby can do! ®

*Oh all right, not that far actually.

**Or of course during cosmic-ray collisions in the upper atmosphere all the time.