A Large Ion Collider Experiment
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.
Since 2009, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator has been smashing together protons, in a bid to shed light on the fundamental nature of matter.
But now the huge machine will be colliding lead ions instead.
The experiments are planned for early November and will run for four weeks.
The LHC is housed in a 27km-long tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border and is managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern).
The collider consists of four different experiments and one of them, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions.
The goal of these collisions is to investigate what the infant Universe looked like. Colliding protons at high energies was aimed at other aspects of physics, such as finding the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.
Cern’s spokesman James Gillies told BBC News that besides ALICE, the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments will also be temporarily colliding ions.
Big Bang
He said the tests could provide an insight into the conditions of the Universe some 13.7 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.
They will look at the Universe fractions of a second after a tiny but very dense ball of energy exploded to create the cosmos as we know it today.
“Start Quote
At the temperatures generated, even protons and neutrons will melt, resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons”
End Quote David Evans University of Birmingham, UK
Scientists believe that it was back then that a special state of matter existed, different from the matter the Universe is formed of now.
“Matter exists in various states: you can take a material like water and if you deep freeze it, it’ll be solid, and if you put it on a table, it’ll turn into a liquid, and if you put it into a kettle, it’ll turn into a gas,” said Dr Gillies.
“It’s all the same stuff, but those are different states of matter. And if you take materials into laboratories, you can pull the electrons off the atoms and you have another state of matter which is called plasma.”
But at the very beginning of the Universe, there might have been yet another state of matter. Physicists have dubbed this “stuff” the quark-gluon plasma.
“And this is the state of matter you have if you’re able to effectively melt the nuclear matter that makes up atoms today, releasing the things that are inside, which are quarks and gluons,” Dr Gillies explained.
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CERN completes transition to lead-ion running at the LHC
Four days is all it took for the LHC operations team at CERN to complete the transition from protons to lead ions in the LHC. After extracting the final proton beam of 2010 on 4 November, commissioning the lead-ion beam was underway by early afternoon. First collisions were recorded at 00:30 CET on 7 November, and stable running conditions marked the start of physics with heavy ions at 11:20 CET today.
“The speed of the transition to lead ions is a sign of the maturity of the LHC,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The machine is running like clockwork after just a few months of routine operation.”
source CERN