CERN

The world's largest particle accelerator has performed its first collisions, and its first beam acceleration.

Progress on the giant experiment has been rapid in the four days since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was restarted, CERN director of communications James Gillies told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"These collisions are the first in the LHC at all," said Gillies. "We've been going into new territory. It's been going quite remarkably fast."

Gillies told ZDNet UK that not only had scientists recorded the first collisions of protons on Monday, but that overnight one of the … Read more

The world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is in full operation after a year of repairs.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, said in a statement on Friday that particle beams are once again circulating in the LHC, and that a clockwise circulating beam was established at 10 p.m. in Geneva.

According to the CERN Twitter feed, an anticlockwise beam was also successfully injected, and both beams have completed many thousands of turns of the LHC.

Read more of "Large Hadron Collider up and running again" at ZDNet UK.

I am all for discovering the Meaning of Life. And though I was once concerned that you could never trust scientists enough to find it, many wise people persuaded me that we should still try.

However, I am concerned with the news reported by the Guardian that a hungry bird has halted testing on the Large Hadron Collider.

The Collider, positioned on the increasingly sensitive border between France and Switzerland, has been quiet for more than a year after electrical faults and helium leaks.

It is now being tested to prepare it for action and reaction. However, a de-beaked piece … Read more

A 32-year-old nuclear physicist, part of the Large Hadron Collider project on the Swiss-French border, has been arrested by French police on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaeda.

According to The Independent, the arrest was made after anti-terrorist police had followed his movements for more than a year. Le Figaro newspaper suggested that the man's name had originally come to light in connection with the "Afghan network" of terrorist groups based in Europe.

Of Algerian origin, he was arrested together with his brother, who was not working on the Collider.

Sources told The Independent that the scientist was … Read more

The world's largest particle accelerator is on course for a November restart. Six out of eight superconducting sectors are down to working cryogenic temperatures, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

James Gillies, head of communications for CERN, told ZDNet UK on Monday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would probably be ready to collide beams of particles by mid-November.

"Things are going well," said Gillies. "We hesitate to say 'hurray' just yet, but things are going smoothly."

Gillies said CERN plans to restart the giant experiment in incremental stages.

Read more of … Read more

After a year of setbacks, CERN plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider in November at a tempo that won't overtax the machinery behind the giant particle physics experiment.

The collider, located deep underground on the border between France and Switzerland, will start out running at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam, about half the energy that CERN expects eventually. The physicists will inject and capture high-energy beams running in each direction on the circular collider's 17-mile circumference, log data over a number of weeks, and simply get themselves up to speed … Read more

The latest delays to the restart of the Large Hadron Collider are likely to have been caused by a faulty hose, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Liquid helium leaks in the world's largest particle accelerator were probably caused by a problem with a flexible hose in the liquid helium transport circuits, the organization said an article in its official bulletin, published on Friday.

The hose vented helium into the vacuum insulation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN officials suspect.

CERN has revised the restart date of the LHC several times since the experiment was … Read more

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back even further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment.

The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The project had been expected to start again in October.

To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as "floats," while the remainder of the surrounding sectors … Read more

The grid that will process data from the Large Hadron Collider has undergone stress-testing, as CERN and other groups try to gauge its limits.

The tests, called Scale Testing for the Experiment Program '09, threw huge amounts of data around the distributed computing project, which uses dedicated optical-fiber networks to distribute data from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) to 11 main computer centers in Europe, Asia, and North America.

From these centers, data is dispatched to over 140 centers in 33 countries around the globe, where the LHC data is managed and processed. The recent grid tests, which lasted … Read more