Monday, March 22, 2010

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Energy Record Again

Via BBC -

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics experiment, has broken its own particle beam energy record.

On Friday morning, the machine created two beams of protons, each with an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts.

The effort breaks the prior record, set by the LHC in December, of just over a trillion electron volts in each beam.

The LHC will now aim to smash those two beams together, hoping to create new particles that give insight into the most fundamental workings of physics.

[...]

"Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC's overall design, and the improvements we've made since the breakdown in September 2008," said Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at the Swiss laboratory Cern, where the LHC is based.

"It's a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC operation team."

[...]

In an announcement of the 3.5 TeV result, he congratulated the LHC team and stressed the cutting-edge nature of its work.

"We must not lose sight of the fact that the LHC is new, and it wasn't bought off the shelf," he wrote.

[...]

"It is a state of the art prototype that is pushing the limits of technology across a wide range of disciplines, and as such it needs to be treated with the greatest respect," Professor Heuer wrote.

"It takes time, but as we've seen this week, patience pays dividends."

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