[tt] NYT: Protons and Champagne Mix as New Particle Collider Is Revved Up

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Protons and Champagne Mix as New Particle Collider Is Revved Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/science/11collider.html

By DENNIS OVERBYE

BATAVIA, Ill. -- Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a
river of Champagne into the future on Wednesday.

After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside
Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world's
largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the
most expensive scientific experiment to date.

At 4:28 a.m., Eastern time, the scientists announced that a beam of
protons had completed its first circuit around the collider's
17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border.
They then sent the beam around several more times.

"It's a fantastic moment," said Lyn Evans, who has been the project
director of the collider since its inception in 1994. "We can now
look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and
evolution of the universe."

Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to
energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them
together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a
trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the
machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space,
allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of
nature.

An ocean away from Geneva, the new collider's activation was watched
with rueful excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, or Fermilab, which has had the reigning particle
collider.

Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers, and three local
mayors gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new high-energy
physics. They applauded each milestone as the scientists
methodically steered the protons on their course at CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Many of them, including the lab's director, Pier Oddone, were
wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even nightcaps bearing Fermilab
"pajama party" patches on them.

Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder
that the universe was beautiful and mysterious and that another
small step into that mystery was about to be taken.

Dr. Oddone, who earlier in the day admitted it was a "bittersweet
moment," lauded the new machine as the result of "two and a half
decades of dreams to open up this huge new territory in the
exploration of the natural world."

Roger Aymar, CERN's director, called the new collider a "discovery
machine." The buzz was worldwide. On the blog "Cosmic Variance,"
Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan called the new collider "a
why machine."

Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge
from the proton collisions, had called it a doomsday machine, to the
dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and
reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.

But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the
speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz about particle
physics. "This is something that people can talk to their neighbors
about," he said.

The only thing physicists agree on is that they do not know what
will happen -- what laws and particles will prevail -- when the
collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.

"That there are many theories means we don't have a clue," said Dr.
Oddone. "That's what makes it so exciting."

Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called
the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles
with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the invisible
dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides
the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions
of space-time.

But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider were a
car, then what physicists did Wednesday was turn on an engine that
will now warm up for a couple of months before anyone drives it
anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of five
trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.

Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on all those
gathered here.

Once upon a time the United States ruled particle physics. For the
last two decades, Fermilab's Tevatron, which hurls protons and their
mirror opposites, antiprotons, together at energies of a trillion
electron volts apiece, was the world's largest particle machine.

By year's end, when the CERN collider has revved up to five trillion
electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second.
Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass
and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch
back in time toward the Big Bang.

In 1993, the United States Congress canceled plans for an even
bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting
Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. In the
United States, particle physics never really recovered, said the
supercollider's former director, Roy F. Schwitters of the University
of Texas in Austin. "One nonrenewable resource is a person's time
and good years," he said.

Dr. Oddone, Fermilab's director, said the uncertainties of steady
Congressional financing made physics in the United States unduly
"suspenseful."

CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countries with a
stable budget established by treaty. The year after the
supercollider was killed, CERN decided to build its own collider.

Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531
million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Dr. Oddone
said that Americans constitute about a quarter of the scientists who
built the four giant detectors that sit at points around the
racetrack to collect and analyze the debris from the primordial
fireballs.

In fact, a remote control room for monitoring one of those
experiments, known inelegantly as the Compact Muon Solenoid, was
built at Fermilab, just off the lobby of the main building here.

"The mood is great at this place," he said, noting that the Tevatron
was humming productively and still might find the Higgs boson before
the new hadron collider.

Another target of physicists is a principle called supersymmetry,
which predicts, among other things, that a vast population of new
particle species is left over from the Big Bang and waiting to be
discovered, one of which could be the long-sought dark matter.

The festivities started at 2 a.m. Chicago time. Speaking by
satellite, Dr. Evans, the collider project director at CERN,
outlined the plan for the evening: sending a bunch of protons
clockwise farther and farther around the collider, stopping them and
checking their orbit, until they made it all the way. He noted that
for a previous CERN accelerator it had taken 12 hours. "I hope this
will go much faster," he said.

Twenty minutes later, the displays in the control room showed that
the beam had made it to its first stopping point. A few minutes
later, the physicists erupted in cheers when their consoles showed
that the muon solenoid had detected collisions between the beam and
stray gas molecules in the otherwise vacuum beam pipe. Their
detector was alive and working.

Finally at 3:28 Chicago time (10:28 a.m. at CERN), the display
showed the protons had made it all the way around to another big
detector named Atlas.

At Fermilab, they broke out the Champagne. Dr. Oddone congratulated
his colleagues around the world. "We have all worked together and
brought this machine to life," he said. "We're so excited about
sending a beam around. Wait until we start having collisions and
doing physics."