Atom smasher opens 'new era' for science
Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher on Tuesday started colliding particles at record energy levels, opening a new era in the quest for the universe's deepest secrets.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light.
"This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we have collisions at 7 TeV (teralectronvolts)," said Paola Catapano, a CERN scientist and spokeswoman, referring to the record energy levels achieved.
CERN Director General Rolf Heuer could barely contain his excitement by video conference from Japan: "It is a fantastic moment for science."
Within an hour, physicists from dozens of countries around the world were marvelling at their initial observations, rendered graphically as colourful bursts of energy.
"What we saw within the detector was really a firework, a lot of energy, something completely different from what we have seen until now," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for one of the biggest parts of the experiment.
The success came after a faltering start at the giant 3.9 billion euro (5.2 billion dollar) machine under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, which is aimed at unravelling some of the outstanding secrets of the universe.
But collisions among the 20 billion protons emerged in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at 1:06 pm (1106 GMT), creating powerful but microscopic bursts of energy mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang that created the universe.
"We're within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang," CERN spokesman James Gillies told AFP.
Cheers and applause erupted in separate control rooms as the detectors recorded the collisions of sub atomic particles on computer screen graphs.
"We're certainly going to do the same thing several times over the coming week and hundreds of times over the year," said Steve Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology.
Myers had likened the attempt to firing needles from either side of the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way, while the particles sped around the ring more than 5,000 times a second.
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