LHC sets new power record after smashing TeV record

by Stevie Smith - Nov 30 2009, 10:22

With a solid year of repairs and safeguard enhancements applied to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists at the CERN facility on the border of Switzerland and France are now in the process of gradually powering up their massive 27km long particle accelerator ahead of next year’s atom-smashing experiments.

More pointedly, the revamped LHC has established itself as the world’s highest energy particle accelerator after it set a new record for power usage, pushing its twin proton beams around the giant ringed machine at some 1.18 trillion electron volts (TeVs).

The previous energy record was held by the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermi Lab in Chicago, Illinois, which fell just short of breaking the billion barrier (0.98 TeV).

“We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going,” enthused CERN director general Rolf Heuer. “It is fantastic.”

“However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010,” he added cautiously. “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”

According to CERN officials, next on the schedule is a concentrated commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity before delivering good quantities of collision data to the experiments before Christmas. Up until this point, the LHC has only been operated with a low-intensity pilot beam.

Collisions within the LHC are presently pencilled in for the first quarter of 2010 at a collision energy of seven TeV (3.5 TeV per beam), at which point the contentious machine, which is buried deep underground, is likely to dredge up a fresh wave of fear mongering and conspiracy theories.

At the tail end of 2008, the $10 billion USD particle accelerator suffered a shock helium leak during ramp-up tests, which inflicted serious operational damage and required a year of work to repair 53 superconducting magnets that failed when electrical overheating ruptured the cooling system.

Scientists hope the smashed protons, which will be travelling at close to the speed of light when they contact, will re-create conditions in the universe moments after the Big Bang. They also hope it will provide a first glimpse at the elusive Higgs Boson, which is also known as The God Particle.

Critics of CERN’s gigantic device believe its particle-smashing experiments could create black holes capable of destroying the planet, while others have even suggested a long succession of mechanical failures attributed to the accelerator are the result of time-travelling particles working to prevent the machine’s operation.

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