Scientists beaming after testing big atom smasher

GENEVA – A small blip on a computer screen sent champagne corks popping among physicists in Switzerland. Near Chicago, researchers at a “pajama party” who watched via satellite let out an early morning cheer.

The blip was of cosmic proportions, representing a new tool to probe the birth of the universe.

The world’s largest atom smasher passed its first test Wednesday as scientists said their powerful tool is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the “big bang,” which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars and planets.

 It is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million. Japan, Canada, Russia and India are other major contributors.
Some scientists have been waiting 20 years to use the LHC.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. They could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle – the Higgs boson – which is sometimes called the “God particle” because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

The LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, provides much greater power than earlier colliders, and the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power. The collider required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, said Luciano Maiani, CERN director-general at the time.

To create collisions, the beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide.