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CERN Confident of LHC start-up
in 2007
Geneva, 15 December 2006. Delegates attending the 140th meeting of CERN* Council
today heard a confident report from the Laboratory about the scheduled start-up
of the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collier (LHC),
in 2007.
Housed in a 27 kilometre tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the
LHC is the world's largest and most complex scientific instrument. Experiments
at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with
Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is
unable to explain why the fundamental particles have the masses they have.
Experiments at the LHC may provide the answer. LHC experiments will also search
for the mysterious missing mass and dark energy of the Universe – visible matter
seems to account for just 4% of what must exist. They will investigate the
reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe
matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.
As 2006 draws to a close, some 80% of the LHC’s magnets, the main components of
the new machine, were installed underground and a complete sector of the machine
was being prepared for cool-down to its operating temperature of just 1.9
degrees above absolute zero, colder than outer space. “Although just one eighth
of the LHC,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, “this sector will be the
world’s largest cryogenic installation when it is cooled down early next year.”
Progress is equally impressive for the four large experiments preparing to take
data with the LHC’s colliding particle beams. Named ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb,
all are striving to be ready for first collisions late in 2007.
When data flow from the experiments gets up to speed, it will be produced at a
prodigious rate, reaching close to one percent of the world’s information
production rate. Handling this amount of data demands a new approach to
distributed computing, called the Grid. In 2006, the LHC computing grid began
offering a baseline service to the LHC community, right on schedule for a full
service to begin in 2007.
The year 2006 has been a busy, but exciting, one for CERN. As it draws to a
close, the LHC project is in good shape. Hurdles have been overcome, and the
project is proceeding smoothly towards collisions in the LHC by this time next
year.
Footnote
* CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading
laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present,
its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India,
Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the
European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
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