GENEVA — Scientists are preparing the world’s largest atom smasher to explore the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.
When the machine is fully operational, its magnets will control beams of protons and send them in opposite directions through two parallel tubes the size of fire hoses.
In rooms as large as cathedrals 300 feet under the Swiss-French border, the magnets will force the protons into huge detectors to smash them together.
One goal is to unravel the mysteries of the Big Bang that many scientists theorize marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.
The restart of the Large Hadron Collider late Friday was hailed as a leap forward in efforts to launch new experiments, probably in January.
Praise from scientists around the world was quick.
“I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running,” said Dennis Kovar of the U.S. Department of Energy, which participates in the project. He called the machine “unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years.”
Scientists decided Saturday to test all the protection equipment while there still is a very low-intensity proton beam circulating in the collider. The tests will take 10 days, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known by its French acronym, CERN.
He said CERN decided against immediately testing the collider’s ability to speed up the beams to higher energy or to start with low-energy collisions that would help scientist calibrate their equipment.
“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone, we’re well on the way,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said.
With great fanfare, CERN circulated its first beams on Sept. 10, 2008. But the machine was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to the magnets and other parts of the collider.
Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators, said the improvements since then have made the collider a far better understood machine than it was a year ago.
It is expected soon to be running with 3 1/2 times more energy than the world’s most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago.
The two laboratories are friendly rivals, working on equipment and sharing scientists. But each would be delighted to make the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field that theoretically gives mass to other particles. That is widely expected to deserve the Nobel Prize for physics.
