p2pnet view Cool:- Here’s what you saw on the Atlas home page at 6:34 am March 31 >>>

Collision energy is 7 TeV (3.5+3.5)
Highest luminosity = 9×10²⁶ cm^-2s-¹
Total Collisions (at 7 TeV) = 462,288

Explains the site >>>

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Starting in late 2009/2010, the ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate. Among the possible unknowns are the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, unification of fundamental forces, and evidence for dark matter candidates in the Universe.

Pessimists wondered if The World Would Come To An End would come when the LHC was fired up.

But we’re all still alive. Kind of.

The Atlas experiment, described by the Telegraph as a racetrack around which two streams of protons – building blocks of matter – run in opposite directions before smashing into one another, went active yesterday.

The experiment is built on “a vast array of tunnels, semiconductors and hulking monitoring devices collectively known as the Large Hadron Collider, built at a cost of $10 billion by a consortium of 20 European countries”, explains the Toronto Star, going on >>>

The machine is capable of firing sub-atomic particles in opposite directions at velocities just shy of the speed of light, resulting in high-energy collisions measuring up to 14 trillion electron volts — the same super-heated conditions that existed a picosecond after the Big Bang and long before matter was formed.

By comparison, it takes just 13 electron volts to bind the components of a hydrogen atom.

“We’re looking at a trillion times that energy,” said Robert Mann, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo.

Not that they quite hit those levels near Geneva on Tuesday.

They won’t try to run the collider at top speed for at least another two years, so breathtaking scientific discoveries may have to wait.

But the possibilities are sensational, none more so than the prospect of finding the Higgs Boson, sometimes known as the “God particle.” Its interaction with other particles gave birth to matter in a universe that could have been filled with energy alone.

At least, that’s the theory.

But no one has ever seen a Higgs Boson, adds the Toronto Star.

Meanwhile, as The Economist once summed it up, the real news, “will come when CERN actually finds something”.

So stay tuned.

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Telegraph – Large Hadron Collider: subatomic particles to travel on second circuit, September 10, 2008
The Economist – Into the wild blue yonder, September 10, 2008
Toronto Star – Scientists move closer to finding the ‘God particle’, March 31, 2010

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 10:37 am and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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