The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has started working again gradually and reach full power in May, with the confidence of the physics community that will open new windows of knowledge and will lead to discoveries that will extend the frontiers of science.
“This may be a new era for science,” said Dave Charton today, a spokesman of the ATLAS detector, one of four experiments that take place on the accelerator of the European Centre for Physics Research (CERN).
“There is a whole series of questions that will try to answer,” he said at a press conference to present the new stage of operation of the accelerator, which is three years before entering a new period of technical review.
The LHC is the most powerful machine that exists, with conductor magnets which work like batteries, and its stored energy equivalent to that of a moving aircraft carrier 43 kilometers per hour or an Airbus 380 flying at 700 miles per hour.
The accelerator has the shape of a ring 27 kilometers in circumference and is located within a 80m tunnel underground, on the border of Switzerland and France.
To work required to be at a temperature of 217 degrees Celsius, lower than that of space, and that was achieved late last year.
“We have worked very hard to improve the detector and have demonstrated (during the first stage of operation) we are able to exceed expectations. We hope we can surprise again, “said Tiziano Camporesi, spokesperson of the CMS experiment, one of which houses the accelerator
The scientist was referring to the greatest discovery in the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2012:. The Higgs, who came to confirm the Standard Model in particle physics that is based.
Thus, it was found, first, their existence experimentally and not just in theory .
In the past two years, the accelerator has been reviewed in minute detail, with each piece and connection that has gone through controls to prepare to support the energy reach of 13 TeV (tera), which almost double the power of the first stage.
That energy level will be reached in May, following a gradual increase in a process that has already begun, said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
When you arrive at 13 TeV proton collisions will occur at a comparable power that is needed to melt one ton of steel, told Efe Chief Technology CERN, José Miguel Jiménez.
To do this, the particles began to be introduced this weekend on the accelerator and is expected to begin to move-in opposite directions which then produce the colisiones- within the ring in about two weeks.
Since then, physicists at CERN calibrated direction of the protons, which can not be achieved only with the automatic procedures for measuring and correcting available to the LHC, explained the responsible organization Infrastructure Lluis Miralles.
This calibration is vital to the extent that, once the optimized procedure, proton beams will 11,000 revolutions per second at 27 kilometers off the accelerator.
The level of accuracy for the protons collide-and thus produce the data needed by physicists is comparable to having two arrows diameter of a needle, shot 47 kilometers (facing each other) and whose tips meet halfway.
All to discover “another model of physics that goes beyond what we know and can not explain what we see,” said Miralles.
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