GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists at CERN, buoyed by their ground-breaking success in creating mini-Big Bangs, giving them a glimpse of the dawn of time, have set their sights on pushing closer to the very birth of the universe.
Just a day after achieving the first megapower particle collisions at 50 per second, they began efforts on Wednesday to boost that number to 300 per second inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
"We are moving to ever new frontiers of science," said spokesman James Gillies as new bunches of particle beams were injected in opposite directions into the 27-km (16.8 mile) oval LHC under the borders of France and Switzerland near Geneva.
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| A graphic showing a collision at full power is pictured at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva. Reuters |
But Gillies said staging new collisions had been put off until late in the day as technicians worked to smooth out minor glitches in the huge and complex machine of the type that twice delayed the start of the programme on Tuesday.
"Nothing of what happened today is show-stopping," he added. "We are pushing on. Small problems are normal in a project of this size." The aim is to increase in the coming months the flow of data on what happens when particles smash into each other at a total force of 7 million million electron volts, or 7TeV, and at a mini-fraction under the speed of light.
At those powers, the collisions came very close to simulating events just nano-parts of a second after the real Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago which led to the creation of galaxies, stars, life on Earth, and perhaps life elsewhere.
Gillies said the number of particle bunches would be increased from two at a time on Tuesday to up to 2,700 over the initial 18 months to two years of the first "New Physics" stage of the $9.4 billion marathon LHC project.
LIKE CARS ON MOTORWAY
"It would be like sending more and more cars in opposite directions down one side of a motorway, more and more would be smashing into each other head-on," he added.
The collisions, shown on CERN monitors in multicoloured graphics like traditional artists' visions of the primeval fireball and its aftermath, are being tracked by thousands of scientists around the world involved in the project.
They and their colleagues at CERN, staffed by scientists and researchers from some 30 countries, are hoping to discover what the invisible dark material believed to make up 25 percent of the universe is and perhaps discover new dimensions.
Some outside researchers, echoed by doomsday theorists, say CERN is putting at risk the survival of mankind by also creating tiny black holes -- mini-versions of the vast ones at the heart of most galaxies which suck in all matter that comes close.
Scientists on the LHC reject this possibility. "The black holes that might emerge in our collisions will survive a fraction of a second and then dissolve. They present no danger to humankind," said Denis Denegris, a CERN physicist.
If no big problems arise, injection of beams into the LHC will continue almost daily until near the end of 2011, when the hugely complex project will be suspended for a year to prepare the LHC for more powerful collisions.
From 2013, particles will be smashed together at a total force of 14 TeV, and that could turn up what CERN's director of research Sergio Bertolucci calls "unknown unknowns" -- aspects of the make-up of the universe that come as a total surprise.
CERN specialists say that the Higgs Boson, a theoretical energy particle that helped turn the disparate matter spawned in the Big Bang into mass and thus made creation of the cosmos possible, is most likely to be found at that stage.
On Tuesday CERN physicists smashed sub-atomic particles into each other with record energy, creating thousands of mini-Big Bangs like the primeval explosion that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Scientists and engineers in control rooms burst into applause as the $9.4 billion project to probe the origins of the cosmos scored its first big success.
"This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery," said CERN's director of research Sergio Bertolucci. "It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn't know existed."
"It just shows what we can do in pushing knowledge forward on where we came from, how the early universe evolved," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said. |
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