| Large Hadron Collider sets new world record for particle acceleration |
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| Written by Bryan Bastible, The Shorthorn staff | ||||
| Monday, 30 November 2009 07:15 PM | ||||
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The Large Hadron Collider set a world record Sunday night, becoming the world’s highest energy particle accelerator. The collider, built in 27-kilometer tunnel near Geneva, is also the world’s largest particle accelerator. The university built parts for the ATLAS detector, a part of the collider. UTA also has graduate students and post-doctorate students working in Geneva and faculty working in collaboration from the university. Physics professor Kaushik De is the ATLAS experiment’s U.S. computing operations coordinator. The LHC broke the previous world record of 980 gigaelectron volts by 200, which was set in 2001 by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron Collider in Illinois. Physics interim chair Alex Weiss said the record-setting could be compared to when Christopher Columbus set out on his voyage and passed the point where everyone else had turned back. In a way, they haven’t discovered America yet, but it illustrates they are on their way of reaching their goal of making physics discoveries, he said. De said there was a rumor that the collider would get to about 1,200 gigaelectron volts before the holidays. “So we have already reached our goal of what we wanted to achieve before the holidays,” De said. “I was expecting it to show up around the end of this week.” He said he was surprised it happened so quickly because he had thought things would be going a lot slower due to a gas leak incident, which set the experiment back. “They didn’t go all the way to 1,200. They went to 1,180, which is about 200 more than Fermi,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to happen so fast.” He will head to Geneva on Tuesday, after his class, to discuss plans such as for higher-speed collisions. “We haven’t seen anything in our experiment yet at this new energy, so for us to see something at this new energy, we need to collide the two beams, and they haven’t done that yet,” he said. The goal is to reach about 3,500 gigaelectron volts, which might happen around spring break. “Once we get to 3,500, that’s more than 3 and 1/2 times the energy at Fermilab, and that’s a big increase,” he said. “Then we are doing new physics.” Weiss said the LHC breaking the world record could mean additional funding and more positive publicity for the university because of its involvement. “We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010,” said Rolf Heuer, CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research - director general in a press release. “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.” Views: 337 | E-mail
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