Particle beams successfully injected into "Big Bang Machine"
27 Oct 2009, 1151 Hrs

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London, October 27 Reports indicate that engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully injected beams of particles into two sections of the vast machine.

According to a report by BBC News, an LHC spokesperson said this was the first time particle beams had been inside the LHC since it was shut down late in September 2008.

Scientists working on the giant particle accelerator described the success as "a milestone".

They plan to circulate a beam around the 27 km-long tunnel in November.

The LHC was closed down shortly after its switch-on last year, when a magnet problem called a "quench" caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into its tunnel.

Since then, engineers have been working to repair the damage. Recently, all eight sectors of the LHC were cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

On October 23 and 25, beams of protons and of lead ions were injected into the LHC ring, and successfully guided both clockwise and anti-clockwise through two of the eight sectors.

Each sector is approximately 3.5km long.

The extreme cold allows the magnets inside the LHC, which align and accelerate the beam, to become "superconducting".

This means they channel electric current with zero resistance and very little power loss.

Gianluigi Arduini, deputy head of hardware commissioning for the LHC, told BBC News the beam test showed that the collider's machinery was operating properly.

"This is a work of synchronization. The fast magnets must be synchronised to accelerate the beam and transfer it from one accelerator to the next and eventually to the LHC, which must be synchronised to accept it," he said.

"This whole process happens within a few hundred picoseconds - one picosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a second," he added.

The beams were injected at 450 billion electron volts, only a fraction of the energy that scientists will aim for when they attempt to collide two particle beams.

Two beams of particles will be fired down pipes running through the magnets - travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.

According to Arduini, "The aim once the beam is circulating is to accelerate (it) up to 3.5 (trillion electron volts)."

"But that will be in stages. We will first go to one, then 3.5... then from 2011, we're going to try to go to seven," he said. (ANI)

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