When the Large Hadron Collider was powered up for the first time in September 2008, only nine days passed before the wrong kind of big bang shut it down for more than a year.
Nine days after the atom-smasher’s restart, physicists have had reason to celebrate: at almost exactly the same point at which it broke down last time, the collider set a world record for particle accelerators.
On Sunday evening the “Big Bang machine” finally claimed the title of the most powerful atom-smasher yet built by accelerating one of its proton beams to an energy of 1.05 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
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The record energy is approximately the equivalent of a dive-bombing mosquito, but packed into a single proton. “It might not sound like a lot, but there are an awful lot of protons in a mosquito,” said Christine Sutton, a spokeswoman for CERN.
Engineers later turned up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) further, reaching 1.18 TeV for both its proton beams.
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“Last time around, nine days was when it all got rather painful,” said James Gillies, director of communications at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva. “This time a few champagne corks have been popping.”
The LHC, which will re-create the conditions immediately after the Big Bang to allow physicists to investigate the fundamental nature of matter, was first powered up on September 10 last year.
On September 19 a connection between two magnets failed, tearing a hole in the collider and causing a huge leak of the liquid helium that cools its superconducting magnets. Engineers took more than a year to investigate and repair the fault and install new safety devices. Beams were again circulated around the collider’s 27km (17-mile) ring on November 20.
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Steve Myers, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology, said that the record crowned an extraordinarily successful restart. “So far, it all augurs well for a great research programme.”
Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, said: “We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”
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The LHC team is now concentrating on increasing the intensity of the beams inside the collider, so that each packs a higher proton punch. High- energy collisions that will provide the first data for new physics investigations are scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
The LHC will then begin the search for the Higgs boson — the elusive “God particle” thought to give matter its mass — and for insights into dark matter, supersymmetric particles and other areas of fundamental physics.