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GENEVA – The world’s largest atom smasher made another leap forward Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time and causing the first particle collisions in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.
The true test of the Large Hadron Collider will come in the first two months of 2010, when scientists plan to start deliberately crashing protons into one another to see what can be discovered about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.
The collisions – seen by massive detectors – were a side effect of the quick advances being made by the LHC during its startup phase, which began Friday night, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.
“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” Heuer said. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program.”
Collisions were recorded in all four of the main detectors at “experiments” in rooms the size of cathedrals about 300 feet underground around the collider.
“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years’ work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance,” said Fabiola Gianotti, who represents the Atlas partical physics experiment for about 2,000 other scientists.
While the initial collisions were a side effect, intentional hits could begin within the next 10 days, mainly to check how the machine is working.
Ultimately, the collider aims to create conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang – which scientists think marked the creation of the universe. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.
