Credit: CERN
GENEVA: The world's biggest atom smasher has set a new world record for beam intensity, a key measure of performance and power, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.
On a quest to unlock some of the universe's deepest secrets, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva collided beams with a luminosity exceeding the mark set last year by the U.S. Tevetron accelerator, CERN said.
In particle physics, luminosity affects the number of collisions - the higher the luminosity, the more particles are likely to collide.
"Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "High intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential."
Several million per second
The new record measured a level of luminosity of 467,000 billion billion billion - 467 followed by 30 zeros - per square centimetre per second, which corresponds to several million particle collisions per second.
Enhanced power boosts the odds of identifying extremely rare sub-atomic particles, especially the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle'.
Earlier experiments have found most of the tiny and ephemeral matter predicted by the so-called Standard Model of particle physics - except the Higgs boson.
Only machine powerful enough
Many scientists believe only the 27-kilometre, 3.9-billion-euro LHC may be powerful enough to detect it.
The current run of LHC experiments is set to continue through 2012, by which time it should be possible to determine if the Higgs boson truly exists, CERN said.
"There's a lot of excitement at CERN today, and a tangible feeling that we're on the threshold of new discovery," said Serge Bertolucci, CERN's Director for Research and Scientific Computing.
Collisions at 99.99% speed of light
So far, CERN has cranked the cathedral-sized machine up to energy levels of 7.0 trillion electronvolts (TeV), or 3.5 TeV per beam, more than three times the level attained by any other accelerator.
It is aiming to trigger collisions at 14 TeV - equivalent to 99.99% of the speed of light - in the cryogenically-cooled machine after 2011.
At full throttle, the collisions should create powerful but microscopic bursts of energy that mimic conditions close to the Big Bang.
Even if validated, the Standard Model only accounts for about five percent of energy and matter in the Universe.
Dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up the rest, but have yet to be detected.
Hasn't gravity been deciphered already?
Well, the discovery of gravity’s exact mechanism along with that of dark matter has already taken place, way back in autumn 2010. I know from my theoretical understanding that it is impossible to find any traces of Higgs boson as a quantum particle in the Hadron collider, neither can it show the existence of dark matter. The details of my discovery of how gravitation exactly works, http://www.anadish.com/ , and how it is produced in the framework of quantum mechanics are lying in wraps with the USPTO and I can only make it entirely public after there is clarity on how the USPTO is going to settle the issue of secrecy on my application. I consciously did not report to any peer-reviewed journal, fearing discrimination, because of my non-institutional status as a researcher; I was right; today Nature Physics out rightly rejected to even consider a short communication submission on the subject (the correspondence is on my site). However, if the USPTO also continues with their non-committal secrecy review under LARS Level 2 (find the PDF of Private PAIR of the USPTO on my site), then, anyway, my discovery may not get published for a long time to come, in spite of me having filed the US patent application (US 13/045,558) on March 11, 2011, after filing a mandatory Indian patent application on January 11, 2011. Till, I find a clue to come out of the maze of government regulations, unless, of course, the USPTO decides to put it out of secrecy.
My friend,(in a gloabal
My friend,(in a gloabal community sense) ,you need to open your mind and not be temtped into fixation limiting your view of the universe to fit with your own theories. You have such a narrow minded view of the cosmos and are ruining what is likely to be an excellent inquisitive mind with pride.
You will not succeed in ground breaking discoveries with this attitude.
Everyone should at least listen to the thoughts of others, not disregard them with arrogance, the ideas that maybe out there may not be polished and could perhaps polish and add to the understanding or rejection of your theories.
cern atom smasher
If the Higgs Boson does exist and it does exhibit the property of changing energy into matter - what if only a single one was needed in the quantum multiverse at the point of the big bang to create all the matter in the universe? If it is recreated, might what is seen be only a miniscule view of something gigantic in other dimensions, with a mere pinpoint protruding into ours?Then what of the effect? Will most or all energy in the vicinity (our galaxy) or in all the universe, be suddenly converted into more matter? Alternatively, what if there are positive and negative Bosons? If we create a negative Boson, will all matter revert to energy and gradually dissipate? All options are open because nobody has found one yet and theories, like mine, are just theories and lots of fun at that.
Elmohu, Brisbane
ping pong
it's just like a high velocity particle ping pong....
..and then they create portals to hell like in doom game