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.
The new Safety Assessment Report said that any black holes produced by the collider would be "microscopic" and decay almost immediately, as they would lack the energy to grow or even be sustained.
"Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists," the authors write.
As for the hypothesised 'strangelets', the report referred to data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to say that these would not be produced during collisions in the LHC.
Interesting, but not worth the apocalpyse
France has also asked a French watchdog agency, the Nuclear Safety Authority, to carry out a safety appraisal of the LHC.
On August 29, the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, tossed out a last-ditch legal bid to stop the LHC's ignition. The suit had been filed by a group of European citizens, led by a German biochemist, Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen.
"If there was a risk of destroying the world, no scientist that I know in the collaboration would turn it on," said White. "Finding out about our universe may be worth years of effort, billions of Swiss francs, long hours and night shifts, but it certainly isn't worth the apocalypse."
With AFP.
