The Hadron Collider just accelerated its first hydrogen atoms

Hadron Collider

By now you surely know what we are talking about when we quote the Large Hadron Collider, an accelerator and particle collider that is located within the facilities of the CERN o European Organization for Nuclear Research. A structure that at the time was designed to collide beams of hadrons in order to examine the validity and limits of the Standard Model of Physics.

In order to carry out this work at the time, facilities were built that are still the largest on the planet today. So that we can get a much better idea, comment that it has been built within a tunnel of 27 kilometers in circumference and in him, to this day, more than 2000 physicists from 34 different countries work While hundreds of different universities and laboratories from around the world worked for its construction.

collider

The Hadron Collider is one of the technologies that is helping the human being the most to understand their environment

As you can see, when we talk about the Hadron Collider we are talking about a technology that, although it is opening new doors to human understanding, the truth is that it also has its shadows. Without going too deeply into what can happen if any part of its structure fails during tests, tell you that in one of its last repairs it took a little over two years to get it working again.

Far from all this, it should be mentioned that precisely to this structure we owe that, for example, in 2012 the Higgs Boson was discovered And, since that date, physicists have managed to learn about a lot of new strange subatomic particles, and it has also faithfully served one of their objectives, that of helping to confirm the limits of reality.

Undoubtedly we are facing a structure to which humanity owes much but, after a decade of experiments, this is the first time that researchers and scientists working at headquarters have dared not only to inject atomic nuclei into the machine, but also lead atoms that contain a single electron.

CERN location

CERN could turn the Hadron Collider into a gamma ray factory

To clarify the purpose of the experiments, those responsible for CERN have announced that this has been only a proof of concept with which it is intended to test a new idea called as Gamma Factory, the same by which it is intended to turn the Hadron Collider into a gamma ray factory capable of producing massive particles and even new types of matter.

In the words of Michaela Schauman, an engineer who works with the Hadron Collider today:

We are investigating new ideas on how we could expand CERN's current research and infrastructure program. Finding out what is possible is the first step.

Contrary to what you might imagine, this kind of experiment is not something new at CERN since literally every year, just before the annual close of winter, researchers experiment and exchange the collisions of protons for atomic nuclei. The novelty is that this time what they have tried is colisoinate whole atoms.

The reason that scientists have never performed this test is something as simple as that lead atoms are brittle and it is tremendously easy to accidentally remove the electron which eventually ends up causing the nucleus to crash against the wall of the ray tube.

According to Michaela Schauman:

If too many particles go off course, the Hadron Collider automatically empties the beam as our priority is to protect its structure.

In the predictions we conclude that the duration of this special type of beam inside the Hadron Collider would be at least 15 hours. In this sense, we were surprised to learn that the useful life could be up to 40 hours. Now the question is whether we can preserve the same beam life at a higher intensity by optimizing the collider configuration, which was still configured to be used with protons.

collider repairs

Researchers seek new uses for the Hadron Collider

If the time comes for researchers to optimize these beams of atoms, the next step would be to shoot the circulating atoms with a laser to get the electron to jump to a higher energy level. Inside the Hadron Collider, the atom would move at a speed very close to that of light, making the energy of the particle incredibly high, while at the same time compressing the wavelength. This would make turned into a gamma ray.

Once the gamma rays are powerful enough, they would have the ability to produce particles such as quarks, electrons and even muons, not to mention that, when the time comes, they could even become massive particles and potentially even new ones. types of matter like dark matter.


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