Doomsday disappointment: This simulated event depicts the decay of a much sought Higgs particle following a collision of two protons in the LHC's CMS experiment.
Credit: CERN
SYDNEY: Those fearing that the LHC, due to fire-up next Wednesday, will cause Earth to be devoured by a man-made black hole can rest assured, says a study released today.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been shadowed by Internet-fuelled concerns that it will release energies so powerful that it will create a runaway black hole that will engulf the planet, or a 'strangelet' particle that would transform Earth into a lump of, well, strange matter.
But the new report said these fears are unfounded. It noted that the LHC will replicate collisions that already occur naturally when Earth runs into the path of high-energy cosmic rays.
Apocalypse not
"The important thing to remember is that the energies we create at the LHC are unique for our experiments, but they certainly aren't unique in the universe. Processes in the Earth's upper atmosphere scale much higher energies all the time without blowing up the world," said Martin White, in the High Energy Physics Group of the University of Cambridge in Britain.
"We've looked at other places in the universe where we'd see catastrophic effects if they were going to happen at the LHC and have ruled out any danger," added White who was not an author of the study, but is involved with LHC research.
The assessment was written by five physicists at LHC's operator, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. They had been asked by CERN to take a fresh look at a safety assessment written by CERN scientists in 2003 that also gave the project the green light. The review is also published in a journal of the Institute of Physics, London.
Invisible rubble
The LHC, installed in a 27-kilometre tunnel on the French-Swiss border, is to start unleashing a beam of protons next Wednesday in the first stage of its commissioning process. Two parallel beams of particles, one going clockwise and the other anti-clockwise, will blast around the underground ring (see, Cosmic roulette, Cosmos Online).
At four locations on the ring, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other in a giant chamber which is swathed with detectors to record the resulting sub-atomic debris.
This invisible rubble could help resolve some of the biggest questions in physics, such as the nature of mass, the weakness of gravity and whether, as some theoreticians suggest, there exist dimensions beyond our own.
