May 24, 2011 11:37 GMT  ·  By
An example of simulated data modelled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
   An example of simulated data modelled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Officials with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announce that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator – has broken new records on Monday. On May 23, the instrument collided more protons than any other accelerator.

Over the past month or so, the number of collisions at the LHC has increased considerably, until it reached a level of about 100 million collisions per second, CERN representatives explain.

They add that the new collision rate should theoretically make it easier for the 3,000+ physicists working at the accelerator and its four primary experiments to detect the elusive particle called the Higgs boson. The elementary particle is believed to enable energy to acquire mass.

Detecting this boson is the primary rationale that drove the construction of the LHC. The accelerator is 27 kilometers (nearly 17 miles) long, and is shaped like a ring. The entire facility is buried some 100 meters below the French-Swiss border, close to Geneva.

It works by accelerating two streams of protons in opposite directions, and then crossing their paths inside three primary detectors – ATLAS, CMS and ALICE. The secondary instruments are LHCb, TOTEM, MoEDAL, and LHCr, Daily Galaxy reports.

“Last night, a symbolic frontier was crossed. This is now 100 million collisions per second,” said the President of the CERN Board, Michael Spiro. He made the announcement at a conference in Paris.

Over the past month alone, the number of collisions at the LHC increased 10-fold. Each particle beam can be accelerated to an energy level of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV), for a total collision energy of 14 TeV.

As the protons smash into each other, they disintegrate, creating an environment that researchers say is nearly identical to the one that existed in the Universe, just billionths of a second after the Big Bang.

CERN physicists said last week, at a conference held in London, the UK, that the LHC experiments will be able to determine whether the Higgs boson exists or not by the end of 2012. If it does exist, the particle would validate the relevance of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

“If we're lucky, and it (the Higgs) is in the right zone for expected mass, we may be able to find it this summer. On the other hand, ruling it out will take us to the end of next year,” the CERN official added.

However, in order to be 100 percent sure that the particle exists, the experiments installed on the LHC would need to make at least 15 detections. This may take some time, but the particle accelerator is now running smoothly.