Completing the circle

I hear that CERN has today finally joined together all the sections of the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They’ll now be able to start cooling the thing down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (–271.3°C). That’s pretty chilly when you consider that most of space simmers away at a relatively warm 2.73 degrees above absolute zero – the temperature of the cosmic microwave background that most scientists believe is the best evidence for the Big Bang.LHC’s cryogenic system uses 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and 130 tonnes of liquid helium to bring down the temperature of the collider. CERN reckons that if all goes well, “the first beams could be injected into the LHC in May 2008, and circulating beams established by June or July”.

CERN director general Robert Aymar adds a note of caution though and says that if there is a problem cooling down any of the eight separate sectors of the LHC, it might not start doing anything useful until the end of next summer.

CERN is hoping that when the LHC does start doing some physics, they will discover the elusive Higgs boson – the missing member of the toolkit from which the Universe and everything in it is constructed. The Higgs is supposed to explain why lightweight electrons have a different mass from heavyweight protons. That might not sound too exciting to the man (or woman) in the street but the geek in me just can’t wait. LHC’s switch-on can’t come a moment too soon.