First images of record-breaking 13 TeV collisions from the Large Hadron Collider released

Well, they’ve finally done it, and so far there’s no black hole originating in Geneva. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has released the first images of proton-to-proton collisions at a record-breaking energy level of 13 trillion electron-volts (TeV). The researchers set up the test collisions in a way that protects both the machine
and the detectors from stray particles from the beam.

Researchers at CERN plan to continue the tests today, monitoring the LHC’s performance and results as they go. Eventually, over the course of the next several weeks, the LHCoperations team will declare the beams stable enough for actual experiments to begin. At that point, CERN will allow the experimental teams running the detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb to each switch on their own systems ahead of the first data recording, which will begin next month.

Before today’s tests, the team had already fine-tuned all of the beam instruments, magnets, and collimators inside the 17-mile accelerator for collisions under 1 TeV. Everything changes at these much higher energy levels, and the pair of 6.5 TeV beams are focused to a much smaller spot size.

“When we start to bring the beams into collision at a new energy, they often miss each other,” said LHC Operations team member Jorg Wenninger in a statement. “The beams are tiny – only about 20 microns in diameter at 6.5 TeV; more than 10 times smaller than at 450 GeV. So we have to scan around – adjusting the orbit of each beam until collision rates provided by the experiments tell us that they are colliding properly.”

After finding the exact points that let the beams interact in optimal conditions to generate the most data, then the ops team has to position the collimators around the beam orbits to intercept stray particles.

“A key part of the process was the set-up of the collimators,” said CERN spokesperson Cian O’Luanaigh in a separate statement today. “These devices which absorb stray particles were adjusted in colliding-beam conditions. This set-up will give the accelerator team the data they need to ensure that the LHC magnets and detectors are fully protected.”

Once everything is secure and ready to go, the first actual experiments at 13 TeV can begin next month. One of the key questions for this new round of tests concerns the origins of dark matter. We know dark matter exists, thanks to its gravitational pull on visible matter and the way galaxies are distributed in our universe. But we can see it for ourselves, since it doesn’t emit any radiation, although some researchers have already found that it may in fact interact with itself in ways other than the force of gravity.

Nonetheless, the LHC will attempt to determine whether dark matter originates from the Higgs Boson, which earlier experiments seem to have confirmed the existence of, as accordance with the Standard Model of Physics as originally outlined in the 1970s. Scientists also plan to use the LHC to search the subatomic real for evidence of supersymmetry, which posits that each particle in the Standard Model has a heavier, undiscovered ‘partner’ particle.