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Ed. note: live video streaming is available on TSR. Le Temps is providing regular reports on site, throughout the day (Fre)

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Fourteen years of building and scientific research, and $9 billion spent to construct and test the world’s most powerful particle accelerator will begin to bear fruit today when Cern attempts to inject and circulate the first beam in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). By mid-morning Cern was able to announce that the first beam had made its first successful tour (see BBC video report). Two hadron beams will travel in opposite directions, picking up energy with each lap: hadrons subatomic particles, either protons or lead ions. Physicists will collide the beams, replicating the Big Bang, allowing them to study conditions that followed the event. The goal is to use physicists’ findings to better understand the underpinnings of our world, from the “minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe,” according to Cern.

The LHC is a mammoth scientific instrument housed in a 27 km tunnel in the French-Swiss border area near Geneva. The start-up process for the LHC has taken several months, starting with cooling down all eight sectors. This was followed by electrical testing of the 1,600 superconducting magnets and  powering them individually, then powering together all the circuits of each sector, and finally the eight independent sectors in unison in order to have them operate as a single machine. In August, the synchronization tests were successfully run.

Webcast, distributed by Eurovision

Background:

• LHC, presented by Cern
• Cern reiterates safety of LHC beam, press release, 5 September 2008
• article on LHC safety in Journal of Physics G: nuclear and particle physics, 5 September 2008 (complete article, free, online)
• “Cern special: the 9 billion dollar question,” Independent 10 September 2008