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Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN1 was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
“It’s a fantastic moment,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans, “we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”
Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.
Once colliding beams have been established, there will be a period of measurement and calibration for the LHC’s four major experiments, and new results could start to appear in around a year. Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.
“The LHC is a discovery machine,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, “its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself.”
CERN, the coolest place in the Universe
“CERN's big chill” - it could be the sensational title of a science-fiction novel, but it's actually a sensational scientific reality! At the beginning of April, a 3.3-km section of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was cooled to a chilly ‑271°C, just a couple of degrees above the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero, and colder than outer space! Sector 7-8 (an eighth of the accelerator) thus becomes the world's largest superconducting installation cooled by superfluid helium.
This great achievement is just a prelude to an even greater one, the start-up of the LHC. The LHC will be the world's most powerful accelerator, designed to answer fundamental questions about the elementary components of matter, the forces that bind them together and the evolution of the Universe.
The whole 27-km LHC ring has to be brought down to this super-cool temperature for the accelerator's magnets to operate in a superconducting state. This will enable them to generate a magnetic field that is sufficiently powerful to bend and focus the proton beams accelerated at close to the speed of light. The cooling will be achieved by placing the 1740 superconducting magnets inside a unique “freezer” – the cryogenic system
