GENEVA — The world’s largest atom smasher broke the world record for proton acceleration Monday, firing particle beams with 20 percent more power than the American lab that previously held the record.
The power of the Large Hadron Collider’s proton beams is essential to the project’s ultimate goal: smashing particles into one another with enough force to shatter them into the smallest building blocks of matter.
The early-morning test continued a recent sequence of successes that have elated scientists who were disappointed by the $10 billion machine’s collapse last year during its opening in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border. The breakdown required extensive repairs and improvements.
The collider fired two particle beams at 1.18 trillion electron volts, surpassing the previous high of 0.98 TeV held by the Chicago-area Fermilab since 2001, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Physicists measure the energy, not the speed, of the hair’s-width beams because the protons are already traveling close to the speed of light and cannot go much faster.
One proton at 1 TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito. When a beam is fully packed with 300 trillion protons with 7 TeV energy — the goal of the LHC — it is like an aircraft carrier traveling at 20 knots.
