U.S. Scientists Count Down to LHC Startup

Batavia, IL, Berkeley, CA and Upton, NY – On September 10, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will attempt for the first time to send a proton beam zooming around the 27-kilometer-long accelerator. The LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Journalists are invited to attend LHC first beam events at CERN and several locations within the United States. Information about the CERN event and accreditation procedures is available at www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam. A list of LHC startup events in the U.S. and contact information for each is available at www.uslhc.us/first_beam.

The LHC tunnel

About 150 scientists from three U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Laboratories - Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California - have built crucial LHC accelerator components. They are joined by colleagues from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of Texas at Austin in commissioning and continuing R&D for the LHC.

United States contributions to the Large Hadron Collider are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

The LHC will go for a test drive this weekend, when the first particles are injected into a small section of the LHC. The LHC is the final step in a series of accelerators that bring beam particles from a standstill to energies of 7 TeV. In the injection test this weekend, scientists will make the first attempt to send protons into the LHC, steering them around approximately one-eighth of the LHC ring before safely disposing of the low-intensity beam.

Next up is a series of tests to confirm that the entire LHC machine is capable of accelerating beams to an energy of 5 TeV, the target energy for 2008. On September 10, LHC scientists will go full throttle and try for the first circulating beam. First collisions of protons in the center of the LHC experiments are expected four to eight weeks later.

Brookhaven National Laboratory led the development of the 32 muon detectors in the LHC's ATLAS detector, above.

“We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,” said CERN’s Lyn Evans, the LHC project leader. “It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research program underway.”

About 1,600 scientists from 93 U.S. institutions participate in the LHC experiments, which will analyze the LHC’s high-energy collisions in search of extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. The LHC experiments could reveal the origins of mass, shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe and possibly find extra dimensions of space.

LHC Photos

	D2800907 Aerial view of Brookhaven National Laboratory taken in August 2007. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (top, center) is 2.4 miles in circumference, and dominates Brookhaven's 5,265-acre campus.
	D2800907 The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory photographed at dusk
	D0230708 Christine Aidala, a member of RHIC's PHENIX experiment, is seen here inside the PHENIX detector itself.
	D1950607 Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory operate one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, named New York Blue and located at Brookhaven Lab, is the world's fastest supercomputer for general users and is expected to rank among the top ten fastest computers in the world.
	D2160505 Known as QCDOC machines, for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on a chip, these supercomputers perform the complex calculations of the theory that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons and the force that holds atomic nuclei together.
	D0420407 Nanotechnology: BNL researchers Eli and Peter Sutter have shown that tiny droplets of liquid metal freeze much differently than their larger counterparts. This study, focused on droplets just a billionth of a trillionth of a liter in size.
	D1951205 The muon g-2 storage ring. This ring, in concert with a beam supplied by the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, was used to make the first precise measurement of how negatively charged muons "wobble" in the magnetic field, information which can be used to confirm the Standard Model of particle physics.
	D5720903 NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) researcher Debasish Roy places a sample into the NSRL beam line.
	D0170204 Staff from the Laboratory's Superconducting Magnet Division examine a "snake" magnet used at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron. Snake magnets are used to flip the spin of the protons as they travel around an accelerator to eliminate depolarization, called “resonances,” which occur during acceleration.
	Deuteron-Gold Collisions (No negative number) An end view of collision between deuterons and gold ions captured by the STAR detector at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
	Magnetic Field (No negative number) Image of the strength of the magnetic field produced by a superconducting quadrupole magnet built by the BNL Superconducting Magnet Division for the HERA electron-proton collider at the DESY Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. It was built using technology developed at BNL for manufacturing some of the specialized magnets for the RHIC facility.
	D0330299 Brookhaven's main gate sign. The Laboratory is operated by Brookhaven Science Associates, a not-for-profit research management company, under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.
	CN8-276-00 RHIC's "siberian snake" magnets have a corkscrew-like design, which causes the direction of the magnetic field to spiral along the direction of the beam. There are two snakes in each of RHIC’s two 2.4-mile-circumference rings, located at opposite sides of each ring. As the beam moves through the snakes, the magnetic field flips the polarization allowing scientists to maintain a stable beam.
	CN7-5-98 The Positron Emission Tomography (PET) facility. Brookhaven is a world leader in brain research, including how drugs, mental illness, nicotine, alcohol and even normal aging affect the brain.
	D2290703 PHENIX is one of the four large detectors that helps physicists analyze the particle collisions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). PHENIX weighs 4,000 tons and has a dozen detector subsystems. Three large steel magnets produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths.
	CN3-146-98 PHENIX is one of the four large detectors that helps physicists analyze the particle collisions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). PHENIX weighs 4,000 tons and has a dozen detector subsystems. Three large steel magnets produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths.
	CN8-221-98 The STAR detector at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). As big as a house, STAR searches for signatures of the form of matter that RHIC aims to create: the quark-gluon plasma.
	STAR Detector (No negative number) End view of a collision of two 30-billion electron-volt gold beams in the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The beams travel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light before colliding.
	CN3-181-96 Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source is a major user facility at the Lab, drawing close to 2,500 visiting researchers each year from industry, universities and other laboratories. They use the Light Source's intense beams of x-rays and ultraviolet light to carry out a wide range of studies in diverse scientific fields.
	CN9-52-96 A view of the superconducting magnets at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. As gold particles zip along the collider's 2.4 mile long tunnel at nearly the speed of light, 1,740 of these magnets guide and focus the particle beams.
	CN4-548-88 Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) attracts about 2,500 scientists each year from academia, industry and other labs to use the facility's powerful x-rays, ultraviolet light and infrared light.
	CN10-45-00 The Brookhaven-developed fan-atomized oil burner offers improved fuel- and air-mixing for better performance.
	Cocaine Abuser Brain Scan A normal brain (top) and a cocaine abuser's 10 and 100 days after taking the drug. Normal metabolic activity, indicated by bright red and yellow, is blunted in the drug abuser.
	'Dancing Triangles' Nanoscale arrangement: Sulfur atoms form "dancing triangles" on copper.
	Nickel Nanoparticle Flux Lines Map showing magnetic flux lines for nickel nanoparticles