Hadron Collider Powers Up to Record Levels

For fans of the Matt Groening show Futurama, try to imagine the following sentence being recited in the voice of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth:

Good news, everyone: the Earth has not been sucked into a tear in the space-time fabric!

I am referring, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

It's the world's biggest and most expensive science experiment. Tonic has been keeping abreast of the developments at LHC over the past few months as the international team of physicists gathered at the facility looping under the France-Switzerland border gears up to dig deep into some uncharted depths of particle physics and mysteries of the universe.

A series of mishaps at the LHC dating back more than a year, with some more recent strangeness, caused some in the scientific community to suggest that what the LHC team seeks is so anathema to the order of things that forces from the future have been traveling back in time to prevent their progress.

But in spite of these otherworldly-seeming cautions, the LHC team is at last making progress toward full power without further incident. Within a matter of weeks, physicists aim to implement high-power particle collision events that are hoped will provide opportunity to stake out some groundbreaking discoveries.

So far so good, according to reports, and the facility already has a record-setting event to note as reported by ScienceNews. LHC has become the world's most powerful particle beam collider with this week's operation at a level of 1.18 trillion electron volts (eV) powering each of its twin proton beams. This breaks the previous record of .98 trillion eV set by the Fermi facility in Illinois.

And ScienceNews goes on to indicate that the pedal hasn't even approached the metal. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the LHC project team intends to conduct particle collision events at power levels of 3.5 trillion eV by March, and at twice that level of power in 2011. If we're all still here, we certainly plan to report on the developments.

Photo courtesy of Muriel, via Wikimedia Commons