What America decided wasn’t important fifteen years ago, Europe will prove is soemtime in late June. Had the Superconducting Super Collider been completed south of Dallas as planned, the magnet would now lie in a 54-mile-long tunnel, accelerating bits of matter to near the speed of light, producing spectacular collisions and re-creating conditions that existed at the universe’s beginning. That was billions od dollars and fifteen years ago.
The Switzerland-based CERN laboratory is scheduled to fire up a new particle accelerator near Geneva. By laying claim to the world’s most powerful collider, Europeans will wrest leadership in high-energy physics away from the U.S. after 80 years of American hegemony.
“Europe’s now playing in the major leagues, and we’re in the minors,” said A&M physicist Bhaskar Dutta.
American physicists have dominated the field since the 1930s, when Ernest Lawrence and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley developed the first cyclotron, an early particle accelerator. But that was then and this is now.
European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory’s head said Tuesday. If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as “the God Particle.”
The “Higgs,” named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain dark matter and dark energy — strange phenomena that, stunned astrophysicists discovered a few years ago, account for 96 percent of the universe.
The LHC device “will be in working order by the end of June,” CERN director general Robert Aymar told journalists. A gamble costing almost six billion dollars that has harnessed the labours of more than 2,000 physicists from nearly three dozen countries, the LHC is the biggest, most powerful high-energy particle accelerator ever built.
Beams of hydrogen protons will whizz around at near-light speed in opposite directions until, bent by powerful superconducting magnets, they will smash together in four bus-sized detector chambers, where they will be annihilated at temperatures hotter than the sun.
And then we’ll know more about the big bang and maybe get some insights to the future coming events: aka 2012!
