A WORLD record has finally passed from the US to Europe and is likely to remain there for some time to come. The giant Cern complex has just broken the record for the highest energies yet achieved when smashing atomic particles together.
The new world record passes from the Fermilab complex outside Chicago and moves to Cern and its 27km long atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. Built into a tunnel under the French-Swiss border, the collider broke the energy record yesterday morning just after 4am.
“Yes, it is historic,” a Cern spokeswoman stated yesterday.
Colliders use powerful magnetic fields to bring atomic particles almost to the speed of light. They then smash them together, something that kicks off unique particles that can teach us about the fundamental nature of matter.
Collision energies are recorded in electron volts, with one teraelectron volt (TeV) equivalent to one million-million electron volts.
The Fermilab complex at Batavia, Illinois set an energy record of 1.96 TeV some years ago, a remarkable achievement. This collider is much smaller at 10km and less powerful than the 27km behemoth at Cern, however.
Yesterday morning Cern reached collision energies of 2.36TeV. The collider crossed particle beams to produce 50,000 collisions per second adjacent to large experiments that measure and record the resultant particles.
Physicists then can analyse the stored data to understand the nature of the particles that are produced.
The €4 billion collider is only in operation for a matter of weeks, this after 20 years of construction and then a 14-month layoff when a serious breakdown stopped it in its tracks in September 2008.
It still has a long way to go and Cern will in time reach much greater energies than this, even to 14 TeV.
For now, however, Cern is content to have broken a record just days before its planned Christmas shutdown tomorrow. “For us what is really important is when we get 3.5 TeV per beam [7TeV collisions],” the spokeswoman said yesterday. “This is when the experiments will begin to deliver new physics.” This target is planned for early next year.