AFTER years of delays, cost-cutting and well-publicised equipment failures, the first protons were successfully injected into the world’s most powerful particle accelerator on 8 August.
The rookie protons travelled for about 3 kilometres around the 27-kilometre ring of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. “The test couldn’t have gone better,” LHC project director Lyn Evans told 91av. The try-out involved using a pulsed magnet to “kick” bunches of protons out of a smaller accelerator and down a transfer line into the LHC.
The injection is one of a long series of checks that the $10 billion collider must undergo before protons can be made to circulate around the entire ring. Last week, CERN announced that the date for this switch-on will be 10 September, with collisions between counter-rotating beams planned for late October.
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The LHC will hunt for particles such as the Higgs boson, which supposedly imbues all other particles with mass.
