Scientists are preparing the world's most powerful atom
smasher torestartmore than a year after it overheated and
failed in initial trials.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for
Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland has
been handed over for operation, according to the
update service on
Twitter.
The $10bn LHC is designed to answer fundamental questions about
the nature of matter by colliding particles at higher energies than
previously achieved.
The current record of collisions at two trillion electron volts
(TeV) is held by the US Tevaton accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia,
Illinois, far below the Large Hadron Collider's capacity of 14
TeV.
But that is not where scientists will start for the second
attempt at using the collider. Instead, they plan to
work up gradually to 5TeV by the end of 2010.
Unlike the first attempt on 10 September 2008, CERN has not
given an exact date planned for the first collisions, but the
advanced state of preparations indicates they may be scheduled to
take place shortly.
Scientist blamed the failure on having to keep to the media
schedule, but the pressure is still on to beat the US accelerator
to observe the theoretical
Higgs boson
elementary particle.
The winner of that race would almost certainly be in line to win
the Nobel Prize for physics, according to the
Telegraph.
The experiments are aimed at showing on a tiny scale what
happened micro seconds after the so-called Big Bang, which some
scientists believe was the massive explosion that formed the
universe.