By Lisa Grossman September 21, 2010 | 3:17 pm |
After nearly 6 months of smashing particles, the Large Hadron Collider has seen signs of something entirely new. Pairs of charged particles produced when two beams of protons collide seem to be associated with each other even after they fly apart.
“It is a small effect, but it is very interesting in itself,” said physicist Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment. Tonelli and colleagues announced the results in a seminar at CERN September 21 and in a paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The LHC finally got up and running in March after more than a year of false starts. Beams of protons were smashed together in the 17-mile-long ring at energies of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) — three times the energy that had been achieved before.
When two protons collide, they produce a flurry of smaller, short-lived charged particles that fly away from each other at certain angles and speeds. The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at the LHC detects the path each of these particles takes. Physicists can then use those tracks to reconstruct what happened at the heart of the collision, like reassembling shards of glass from a broken window.
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