The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this past week. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab’s Tevatron in December, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts, or three times the energy of any beam ever created by human beings and just under half the LHC’s proposed maximum capabilities.
“Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Steve Myers in a press release. “And it’s a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team.”
At full throttle, the LHC could provide scientists with new insights into the nature of mass, dark matter and the origins of the universe. But many of them hope that instead of confirming string theory, dark energy, the Higgs-Boson, etc. — something entirely unexpected will emerge from the CERN-run experiment, for example the detection of certain types of supersymmetric particles, that could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, “signals from the 11th dimension.”
the detection of certain types of supersymmetric particles, aka sparticles, could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, “signals from the 11th dimension.”
