GENEVA - Scientists switched on the world's largest atom smasher Friday night for the first time since the $10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago. It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late Friday in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.
Circulation of the beams was a significant leap forward. The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding themakeup of matter and the universe. Story continues below ↓
3 comments:
Gee whiz Doctor Ralph, thanks. We were tired of that off-Broadway stuff. Like, enough is enough. Right?
What in heck is a proton beam. Do you know?
Protons are spin-½ fermions and are composed of three quarks,[4] making them baryons. The two up quarks and one down quark of the proton are held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons.[3]
Protons and neutrons are both nucleons, which may be bound by the nuclear force into atomic nuclei. The nucleus of the most common isotope of the hydrogen atom is a single proton (it contains no neutrons). The nuclei of heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) contain neutrons. All other types of atoms are composed of two or more protons and various numbers of neutrons. The number of protons in the nucleus determines the chemical properties of the atom and thus which chemical element is represented; it is the number of both neutrons and protons in a nuclide which determine the particular isotope of an element.
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