Groundbreaking news emerged from Geneva this month as CERN announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10th September.
The news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reached a successful conclusion.
The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27km tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago and could ultimately replicate the possible ‘big bang’ theory for the creation of planet Earth.
Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors and followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets – all of which are super-cooled using liquid helium.
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