After more than a decade of construction, the CERN Large Hadron Collider was officially launched on the 10th in an underground laboratory near the French-Swiss border and successfully realized the first beam of proton beams throughout the collider.
At 9:38 p.m. local time on Oct. 10 (15:38 p.m. Beijing time on Oct. 10), the first proton beam was injected into the 27-kilometer-long circular tunnel of the LHC, which is installed at a depth of 100 meters underground. The LHC was then officially launched by CERN director Robert Emma and LHC project director Lynn Evans.
After the first proton beam was injected into the collider, it had to be adjusted segment by segment and walked through all eight segments of the collider. At about 10:25 p.m. local time, researchers announced that the first proton beam had traveled through the entire LHC.
After the first proton beam has penetrated, a second beam will be injected into the collider in the opposite direction after hours to tens of hours of debugging. Only after another period of extremely complex and sophisticated debugging will the collision of the two proton beams begin.
The proton beam is as thick as a hair
At 9:38 a.m. local time on the 10th, the experiment was officially launched with the injection of a beam of protons into the collider. "The proton beam stream is as thick as a hair," said Paula Ketepano, a spokeswoman for CERN, which is in charge of the experiment.
The collider, the world's largest particle gas pedal, was built in a circular tunnel 100 meters deep underground in the border region between Switzerland and France.
Five seconds later, computers in the experiment's control room in Geneva received a signal that the experiment was going well.
The collider at full power ensured that trillions of particles flowed through the nearly 27-kilometer-long tunnel at high speeds of up to 300,000 kilometers per second, or 99.99 percent of the speed of light. At these speeds, the proton beams can travel 11,245 times per second through the tunnel, with a single beam energy of 7 trillion electron volts.
However, the proton beams injected into the collider by the 10-day experiment moved relatively slowly, every few kilometers for a section, moving through the tunnel. This was to check that all the equipment was working properly, including the numerous particle detectors mounted on the tunnel walls.
Nearly an hour after the experiment was launched, two white dots flashed on a computer screen in the control room, showing that the proton beam had circled the tunnel. Scientists in the room cheered and applauded as they celebrated the first proton beam's successful clockwise "maiden voyage.
Following this, scientists will repeat the particle acceleration test several times, increasing the speed of the beam and trying to repeat the experiment in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions.
"The really good result is when another beam comes from the other direction," said James Gillies, CERN's chief spokesman. "It's only when there's a beam coming from each of the two directions that you know there's really no obstruction, and it's time to get on with the job. "
High-speed collision possible as soon as the end of this year
After everything is in place, only then will scientists begin to prepare for the high-speed collision of particles experiment, which will then recreate what happened in a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Before the high-speed particle collision experiment, scientists will try to launch proton beams from two directions at the same time, so that the particles collide at a lower intensity.
Superconducting magnets installed in the tunnel "steer" the proton beams from each end, making sure they meet inside four compression chambers densely packed with particle detectors. "It's like a machine gun shooting bullets aimed at each other," explains physicist Daniel Dannegre, "Some of the bullets will pass by, and some of the bullets will crash together."
No date has been set at this stage for conducting the particle high-speed collision experiment. Gillis said the initial phase of the experiment will be particle collisions at lower speeds and on a smaller scale. "We'll gain experience at lower energies and familiarize ourselves with the machine's performance before colliding."
It is estimated that the particle high-speed collision experiment is expected to take place as early as the end of this year, or possibly a year later at the latest. At that time, two high-speed proton beams running in opposite directions will collide in the tunnel, releasing enormous heat and energy at the point of collision, similar to what happened when the Big Bang occurred, only on a smaller scale.
Collider experiment to last 10 to 15 years
If the final experiment is successful, scientists will analyze the millions of particles produced in the collision to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.
Once the particles have collided at high speed, scientists will use particle detectors to watch on computer monitors to see how the particles clump together, disperse, or melt away after the collision.
Under these conditions, scientists are expected to discover whether the Higgs boson exists. Of the 62 elementary particles predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson is the only one that has not yet "manifested itself," making it the "God particle.
The particle, proposed 44 years ago by British physicist Peter Higgs, is believed to be the source of the mass of matter and the basis for the formation of mass in electrons and quarks. Higgs suggested that other particles swam in the "ocean" of Higgs bosons, which acted to create inertia and eventually mass. Without mass, the material produced after the Big Bang could not have formed nebulae and planets, and the origin of life would have been impossible to talk about.
The LHC will continue to conduct experiments for the next 10 to 15 years, and the resulting large amounts of particle data will be analyzed by laboratories at universities and research institutions around the world.
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