Scientists Can Look Forward To New Physics With Particle Collider LHC's Success
The world's most powerful particle collider Large Hadron Collider, has surpassed its objectives for 2011, and with this great performance the science community can look forward to a new physics.
In fact, with LHC concluding its main activity for the year, it will be used to collide lead ions to produce pockets of very dense and hot matter, and recreating the conditions that existed in the first seconds after the birth of the universe as posed by the big bang theory.
In a statement released by CERN, it said that the LHC team has largely surpassed its operational objectives, steadily increasing the rate at which the LHC has delivered data to the experiments.
"At the end of this year's proton running, the LHC is reaching cruising speed," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology.
"To put things in context, the present data production rate is a factor of 4 million higher than in the first run in 2010 and a factor of 30 higher than at the beginning of 2011," Myers explained.
The metric for success is known as the inverse femtobarn, which is equal to about 70 trillion particle collisions. The LHC's goal was to produce 1 inverse femtobarn for 2011, but instead it delivered almost 6 inverse femtobarns to each of the two main detectors, ATLAS and CMS.
This is way ahead the record of Fermilab which produced 10 inverse femtobarns in the course of a decade.
"We've got from the LHC the amount of data we dreamt of at the beginning of the year and our results are putting the Standard Model of particle physics through a very tough test " said LHCb Spokesperson Pierluigi Campana.
"So far, it has come through with flying colours, but thanks to the great performance of the LHC, we are reaching levels of sensitivity where we can see beyond the Standard Model. The researchers, especially the young ones, are experiencing great excitement, looking forward to new physics," he added,
Meanwhile, ATLAS praised the LHC operations.
"It has been a remarkable and exciting year for the whole LHC scientific community, in particular for our students and post-docs from all over the world. We have made a huge number of measurements of the Standard Model and accessed unexplored territory in searches for new physics. In particular, we have constrained the Higgs particle to the light end of its possible mass range, if it exists at all," said ATLAS Spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.
Thus, even with the LHC turned off for a scheduled switchover, the work at Europe's CERN particle-physics center continue as researchers seek to unravel some of the world's top scientific mysteries, including the Higgs boson existence, and whether or not neutrinos can really travel faster than light.