Late last month, the Large Hadron Collider succeeded in smashing subatomic particles together at more than three times the highest levels previously recorded, providing the first in what promises to be a flood of data pertaining to the origins of the universe.

A week ago, in a tunnel beneath the Swiss-French countryside, physicists announced they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of their high-powered, marathon probe into the secrets of the cosmos.

Over the years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator and most expensive scientific instrument ever, has faced its share of problems including the threat of bread-dropping birds, malevolent time travelers and even a world-ending black hole.

But on March 30, after two electrical failures earlier that day, the LHC set a record for high-energy collisions by smashing two proton beams together at a combined energy level of 7 tera electron volts (TeV) and recreated the same conditions that scientists believe the universe experienced when it was less than a trillionth of a second old.

“[P]rotons that were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time,” the New York Times reports. “They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe.”

“The collisions create simulations on a tiny scale of the Big Bang, the primeval fireball 13.7 billion years ago out of which the entire cosmos — galaxies, stars, planets and eventually life as well as the universal laws of physics — emerged,” Reuters explains.

The event marked the start of the LHC research program.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a 20-nation consortium and the world’s leading particle physics laboratory, is responsible for the massive machine built to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical framework for particle physics. This model is known to break down at a certain high-energy level. The fundamental goal of the LHC is to answer the basic but crucial question of how matter was created at the birth of the universe.

Needless to say, scientists are very excited about the latest development, calling the March 30 event a huge step forward in cosmic research.

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Source: CERN @ Twitter via Popular Science

Clockwise from top left: LHCb Control Room, ATLAS Control Room, ALICE Control Room Point 2 and ATLAS Control Room
Source: CERN media archive

Experts said that “Tuesday’s smashup transforms the 15-year-old collider from an engineering project in test phase to the world’s largest ongoing experiment,” the Associated Press reports. “The crash that occurred on a subatomic scale is more about shaping our understanding of how the universe was created than immediate improvements to technology in our daily lives.”

“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, said in a statement. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

“This is the moment we have been waiting and preparing for,” ALICE collaboration spokesperson Jürgen Schukraft said. “We’re very much looking forward to the results from proton collisions, and later this year from lead-ion collisions, to give us new insights into the nature of the strong interaction and the evolution of matter in the early Universe.”

The LHC is now on track to determine whether the hypothetical Higgs boson really does exist, as well as to possibly find “dark matter,” “new forces” and “new dimensions,” ATLAS collaboration spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti said.

CERN will run the LHC for 18-24 months, attempting to deliver enough data to make significant advances across a wide range of physics fields, after which the machine will be shut down for a year.

“As with all particle accelerators, the LHC will be periodically shut down for maintenance, but LHC officials recently decided to significantly lengthen the shutdown period,” BBC News says. “This is in part because the machine takes so long to reach and return from the low temperatures required for its experiments. But the shutdown scheduled for late 2011 will also address an issue with the joints between the machine’s superconducting magnets, which must be strengthened before the LHC can run at even higher energies.”

“Two years of continuous running is a tall order both for the LHC operators and the experiments, but it will be well worth the effort,” Heuer said. “By starting with a long run and concentrating preparations for 14 TeV collisions into a single shutdown, we’re increasing the overall running time over the next three years, making up for lost time and giving the experiments the chance to make their mark.”

As soon as the experiments have “re-discovered” the known Standard Model particles, a necessary precursor, the LHC experiments will start the systematic search for the Higgs boson.

Resources

LHC Research Programme Gets Underway
European Organization for Nuclear Research, March 30, 2010

What Do We Already Know? The Standard Package
European Organization for Nuclear Research

Why Does Anything Have Substance? Hunting the Higgs Boson
European Organization for Nuclear Research

European Collider Begins its Subatomic Exploration
by Dennis Overbye
The New York Times, March 30, 2010

CERN Creates 10 Million Mini-Big Bangs in One Week
by Robert Evans
Reuters, April 7, 2010

LHC Finally Smashes Protons, at Highest Energies Ever Recorded
by Clay Dillow
Popular Science, March 30, 2010

Atom Smasher Will Help Reveal ‘The Beginning
by Alexander G. Higgins and Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press, March 30, 2010

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Energy Record Again
BBC News, March 19, 2010

LHC Lays Down, Keels Over
by Stuart Fox
Popular Science, Sept. 22, 2008

Delay (Anew) for the LHC Restart
by Catherine Schwanke
Popular Science, Feb. 10, 2009

How to Fix a Broken Collider: the LHC’s Restart Checklist
by Carina Storrs
Popular Science, Oct. 28, 2009