22:39 23 November 2009 by David Shiga
The Large Hadron Collider bashed protons together for the first time on Monday, inaugurating a new era in the quest to uncover nature's deepest secrets.
Housed in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, designed to collide protons together at unprecedented energies.
It was on the verge of its first proton collisions in September 2008 when a faulty electrical connection triggered an explosion of helium used to cool the machine. This caused a 14-month delay while CERN repaired the damage and installed safety features to prevent a repeat of the accident.
But physicists started whipping protons around the machine again on Friday.
Now, at long last, CERN is heralding the first collisions inside the machine. Two beams of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light crashed together on Monday at 1322 GMT inside the ATLAS detector, one of the giant measuring devices the LHC will use to probe shrapnel from the collisions, according to CERN's announcement. Further collisions occurred inside the LHC's CMS and LHCb detectors.
"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics – and hopefully discoveries – after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said Fabiola Gianotti, a spokesperson for the ATLAS detector project. more...
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