Kudos again, Pete, to you and your team!
Natalia
From Reuters, April 24
CERN atom smasher sets new record
Scientists at the CERN physics research centre reported on Friday that
they had smashed particles together at a record intensity in a key
advance in their program to unveil mysteries of the universe.
The development came in the early hours after they fed beams into the
giant Large Hadron Collider with six per cent more particles per unit
than the previous record, set by the U.S. Fermilab's Tevatron collider
last year.
Each collision in the LHC's 27-kilometre circular underground tunnel -at
a tiny fraction under the speed of light -creates a simulation of the
Big Bang, which brought the universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago.
The higher the "beam intensity" or number of particles in each beam, the
more collisions take place and the more material the scientists have to
analyze. Many millions of these miniBig Bangs are already being produced
daily.
"Beam intensity is the key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very
important step," said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN -the European
Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
"Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery
potential."
"There is a tangible feeling that we are on the threshold of new
discovery," said his deputy, Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director.
As the CERN physicists and engineers ramped up the intensity over the
past week, said CERN spokesman James Gillies, they gathered more
information -stored in thousands of computer discs -than in nine months
of LHC running in 2010.
The $10-billion machine, the world's biggest single scientific
experiment, started up in March 2010. After this year, following the
Tevatron's permanent shutdown in the autumn, it will be the world's lone
supercollider.
Among the LHC's aims is to establish whether an elementary particle,
dubbed the Higgs boson after the British scientist who first suggested
it as the agent that gave mass to particles after the Big Bang, actually
exists.
By observing the collisions on computers at CERN and in linked
laboratories around the world, scientists also hope to find solid proof
of the existence of the dark matter believed to make up nearly a quarter
of the known universe, and perhaps the dark energy thought to constitute
around 70 per cent.
Cosmologists say the CERN experiments may also shed light on emerging
new theories suggesting the known universe is only part of a system of
many, invisible to each other and with no means of inter-communication,
that has been dubbed the "multiverse."
They also look to the LHC, to remain in operation for a decade after a
year-long technical shutdown in 2013, to produce some backup to
indications tracked by other researchers that the known universe was
preceded by another before the Big Bang.
This will also increase the likelihood of new discoveries in what CERN
calls "new physics," taking knowledge beyond the so-called Standard
Model based on the theories of Swiss scientist Albert Einstein early in
the 20th century.
© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist
Read more:
http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/CERN+atom+smasher+sets+record/4667023/story.html#ixzz1KfcmPKCQ
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