Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a “new territory” in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The $10 billion research tool has been accelerating the beams since November in the LHC’s 17-mile tunnel on the border of Switzerland and France.

The beams have routinely been circulating at 3.5 TeV, or teraelectron volts, the highest energy achieved at the LHC so far, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The first two attempts Tuesday failed, said Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators. He said the beams were lost before they reached their full energy.

Experiments at the LHC may help answer fundamental questions such as why Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the world on a large scale — doesn’t jibe with quantum mechanics, which deals with matter far too small to see.

The collider may help scientists discover new properties of nature. The as-yet theoretical Higgs boson, also called “the God particle” in popular parlance, could emerge within two or three years, Myers said in November.

Evidence of supersymmetry — the idea that every particle has a “super partner” with similar properties in a quantum dimension (according to some physics theories, there are hidden dimensions in the universe) — could crop up as early as 2010.

The collider has been dogged by problems. It made headlines late last year when a bird apparently dropped a “bit of baguette” into the accelerator, making the machine shut down.

The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, said spokeswoman Katie Yurkewicz. Had the machine been going, there would have been no damage, but beams would have been stopped until the machine could be cooled back down to operating temperatures, she said.

The collider achieved its first full-circle beam in September 2008 amid much celebration. But just nine days later, the operation was set back when one of the 25,000 joints that connect magnets in the LHC came loose and the resulting current melted or burned some important components of the machine, Myers said.

The faulty joint has a cross-section of a mere two-thirds of an inch by two-thirds of an inch.

Should Tuesday’s experiment go as planned and scientists are able to establish 7 TeV collisions, the plan is to run them continuously for 18 to 24 months with a short technical stop at the end of 2010, CERN said.

“It will be the beginning of a long period of running the accelerator with beams at this energy,” Sutton said. “It’s the period in which experiments will really start to collect data in this new energy region, where the potential for discoveries may be made.”

Sutton compared the experiments to Christopher Columbus sailing for the New World in 1492, when he knew what he was looking for but didn’t know what he might find.

“It’s going into a new energy region,” she said. “It’s a new territory in particle physics, so we’re really just standing on the threshold of that, which is exciting for everybody here, of course.”

Link to article: Hadron Collider breakthrough as beams collide

The Start treaty led to huge reductions in the Russian and US nuclear arsenals.

Russia and the US have both said it should soon be possible to conclude a new nuclear disarmament treaty.

Officials in Moscow and Washington said US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had a “good conversation” reviewing negotiations.

The two countries are trying to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired last December.

The US says it has more than 2,000 nuclear weapons, while Russia is believed to have nearly 3,000.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to discuss nuclear disarmament with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later this week in Moscow.

In a telephone conversation on Saturday, the two presidents “expressed satisfaction with the high level of consensus on the basic lines” of the treaty negotiations, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The pair “stressed that it is already possible to set firm dates to submit the draft agreement to the heads of state for their signatures,” the statement added, without setting the timeframe.

Disagreements

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council said: “Both leaders are committed to concluding an agreement soon.”

US plans for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe have irked Russia.

The two presidents launched talks to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) last April with an original deadline of December.

It was part of a Washington-inspired attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow after years of frayed ties under the administration of former US President George W Bush.

The landmark Start pact was signed in 1991 and led to huge reductions in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

Both sides have agreed to cut the number of warheads they hold to between 1,500 and 1,675 each.

But there have been disagreements on verification measures, how to count weapons and launch systems.

Another bone of contention is the US plan for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe.

In their telephone call, the two leaders agreed to give their negotiators “additional instructions” for concluding a draft treaty, the Kremlin statement said.

US and Russian negotiators have been meeting in Geneva to discuss a successor to the Start treaty.

President Obama has said his goal is to have a nuclear-free world. He has promised to cut the number and role of nuclear weapons in US security strategy.

The US is hosting a nuclear non-proliferation summit in Washington in April.

• All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.
• Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.

Israel
Israeli authorities have never confirmed or denied the country has nuclear weapons.

North Korea
The highly secretive state claims it has nuclear weapons, but there is no information in the public domain that proves this.

Iran
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 2003 there had been covert nuclear activity to make fissile material and continues to monitor Tehran's nuclear programme.

Syria
US officials have claimed it is covertly seeking nuclear weapons.

Link to article: US and Russia ‘near’ new nuclear arms treaty

Workers examine a new Quench Protection System at CERN in January. Image courtesy of CERN

In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions.

This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.

“This is the very first step in a long road to performing extremely sensitive analyses that can detect particles produced only in one in a billion collisions,” says Gunther Roland, MIT associate professor of physics and an author of the new paper.

Roland and MIT professors Wit Busza and Boleslaw Wyslouch, who are members of the CMS (compact muon solenoid) collaboration, were among the study leaders. The CMS collaboration runs one of four detectors at the collider.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located underground near Geneva, Switzerland, started its latest run in late November. On Dec. 8, the proton beams around the 17-mile ring collided at a peak energy of 2.36 tera electron volts (TeV), breaking the previous record of 1.96 TeV achieved at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab. Because of Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, which correlates mass and energy, higher energy levels should produce heavier particles — possibly including some never seen before.

In the new paper, submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics by CMS, the physicists analyzed the number of particles produced in the aftermath of the high-energy collisions. When protons collide, their energy is predominantly transformed into particles called mesons — specifically, two types of mesons known as pions and kaons.

To their surprise, the researchers that the number of those particles increased faster with collision energy than was predicted by their models, which were based on results of lower-energy collisions.

Taking the new findings into account, the team is now tuning its predictions of how many of those mesons will be found during even higher energy collisions. When those high-energy experiments are conducted, it will be critical to know how many such particles to expect so they can be distinguished from more rare particles.

“If we’re looking for rare particles later on, these mesons will be in the background,” says Roland. “These results show us that our expectations were not completely wrong, but we have to modify things a bit.”

Using the Large Hadron Collider, physicists hope to eventually detect the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to give all other particles their mass, as well as evidence for other physical phenomena such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions of space and the creation of a new form of matter called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The new data provide an important reference point when CMS will look for signatures of QGP creation in collisions of lead ions at the LHC later this year.

The CMS team, which includes more than 2,000 scientists around the world, has 45 members (including faculty, students and research scientists) from the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science’s Particle Physics Collaboration and heavy-ion research groups.

The Large Hadron Collider is capable of creating collisions up to 14 TeV, but scientists are gradually easing the machine up to that level to try to avoid safety issues that have arisen in the past. In September 2008, the collider had to be shut down for several months after a connector joining two of the collider’s magnets failed, causing an explosion and leakage of the liquid helium that cools the magnets.

During the collider’s next run in March, researchers hope to create collisions of 7 TeV, says Roland. The success of the latest effort “makes us extremely optimistic about the detector,” he says. “It performed beautifully during the run.”

Link to article: Record-breaking collisions

The Large Hadron Collider is going to skip medium-energy proton collisions, jumping straight to its maximum energy in 2013, after it finishes collecting lower-energy data and has its circuitry upgraded.

The particle accelerator, located outside Geneva, Switzerland, has recovered from its 2008 accident. And in 2009 it broke the world record for particle collision energy when its two oppositely directed proton beams each reached 1.18 TeV, for a total energy of 2.36 TeV.

That made it slightly more powerful than its US competitor, Fermilab, which has been colliding particle beams with energies of 1 TeV, adding up to a total energy of 2 TeV.

After a brief holiday hiatus, the LHC is getting ready to start up again. Its managers have decided to carry out collisions for two years at 3.5 TeV per beam. At the end of 2011, it will shut down for a year for circuitry upgrades, returning in 2013 at its maximum design energy of 7 TeV per beam, or 14 TeV in total.

There had been talk of pushing the LHC to a middling energy of 5 TeV per beam prior to the shutdown at the end of 2011. But scientists apparently decided that was not worth the risk. During the shutdown, the LHC’s electrical connections will be upgraded, making it more robust against short circuits of the kind that caused the 2008 accident.

While the LHC ramps up to maximum energy, Fermilab still has a chance of beating it to the discovery of the long-sought Higgs particle – responsible for endowing other particles with mass – but only if the Higgs turns out to be relatively lightweight.

Link to article: Large Hadron Collider to jump to maximum energy