Atomic collision on the horizon

World's biggest particle accelerator boots up

PARTICLE PHYSICS researchers will be partying on October 21st after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is inaugurated near Geneva, Switzerland. Alexander Vodopyanov, a scientist working at Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, let the LHC's unveiling date slip to RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

Hadrons are the class of relatively massive subatomic particles that includes protons and neutrons, which comprise the nuclei of atoms and are ringed by layered clouds of spinning electrons, which belong to the Lepton class of subatomic particles. [Pay attention at the back there. We may have a test] Other classes of more exotic subatomic particles are Quarks and Bosons. Physics is still learning how they work.

The huge device will boost streams of protons circling in opposite directions up to extremely high energies and smash them together to test the validity of current particle physics theories.

The LHC is called Large because it's the biggest particle accelerator so far constructed, a subterranean tunnel 27 kilometres in diameter that's buried about 100 meters underneath an area straddling the French-Swiss border.

"The collider is to be inaugurated on October 21," said the academician Vodopyanov. "This means at least one test-run of proton beams around the accelerator ring will be conducted prior to inauguration."

He said all eight sections of the collider's large ring have been cooled to temperatures near absolute zero and that a proton beam could be test-fired through one of the sectors as early as this week.

Once the collider gets up and running it will continually generate terabytes of data transmitted to physics research institutions throughout the world for subsequent analysis, pushing the capabilities of state-of-the-art networks and high performance computing (HPC) facilities.

The giant technodonut is a $5.8 billion international project run by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It involves more than 2,000 physics researchers working at hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries.

Particle physicists hope the collider will produce evidence for the existence of the so-called Higgs boson. Observing the Higgs boson could confirm predictions and resolve a number of still unanswered questions about the Standard Model of physics and might help explain how other subatomic particles acquire properties such as mass.