GENEVA Scientists on Monday hailed the restart of the Large Hadron Collider as an “enormous success”, as two beams began circulating simultaneously in the world’s biggest atom-smasher.
“The first three days have been in my opinion an enormous success, we’ve shown that the LHC machine is in superb condition from the beam quality viewpoint,” said Steve Myers, who is director of accelerators and technology at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
“The breaking news is that we have two beams circulating simultaneously in the LHC, that just happened three-quarters of an hour ago,” he added.
The Large Hadron Collider, built in a 27km tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, was started in September 2008, but was shut down nine days later due to technical faults.
A failure in an electrical connection had led to serious damage, leaving scientists to spend 14 months repairing the device.
On Friday, scientists injected the first sub-atomic particles back into the collider and managed to get the particle beams circulating in the accelerator once again.
With two beams now circulating at the same time, the machine is poised for its first collisions. Such collisions could unlock mysteries about the creation of the universe and the fundamental nature of matter.
The LHC at CERN took nearly 20 years to complete at a cost of six billion Swiss francs ($4.9 billion).
Agence France-Presse
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