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LHC at CERN Accelerates 'Atoms' For The First Time

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For the very first time, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has injected and accelerated lead ‘atoms’. This was part of the Gamma Factory idea under the CERN’s Physics Beyond Colliders project. With this new advancement, scientists could be able to make 'exotic' particles like dark matter or a muon (heavy electron) beam with the Large Hadron Collider.

The Gamma Factory idea involves aiming to accelerate high-energy beams of partially stripped ions. A high-intensity laser will be fired at the partially stripped ions and gamma rays will be emitted. Michaela Schaumann, an LHC Engineer in Charge says, ‘We’re investigating new ideas of how we could broaden the present CERN research program and infrastructure. Finding out what’s possible is the first step.’

Normally, CERN is home to proton-proton collision experiments, where protons are accelerated in opposite directions and then allowed to crash into each other. But during just a few days of the year, the accelerator physicists at CERN get to do whatever they want (within limits). This is the time where ‘exotic’ experiments such as accelerating heavy nuclei can occur. An example of one of these experiments, was when CERN decided to accelerate xenon nuclei.

This time, during their ‘free’ days at CERN, the accelerator physicists decided to accelerate lead nuclei which is a challenge because the lead ‘atoms’ only have one electron in their electron shells. Schaumann describes, ‘It’s really easy to accidentally strip off the electron. When that happens, the nucleus crashes into the wall of the beam pipe because its charge is no longer synchronized with the LHC’s magnetic field.’

In the first run, the scientists injected 24 bunches of ‘atoms’ where a stable, low-energy beam was produced for an hour. When transferred into full power mode, the beam lasted only 2 minutes and then was discarded into a beam dump since too many particles were going off course. Schaumann says, ‘Our main priority is to protect the LHC and its magnets.’ The team then tried again, and managed to keep a full power, stable beam for two hours instead of two minutes because they only used six bunches of ‘atoms’. In this run, the beam was intentionally dumped after two hours.

Witold Krasny, a physicist who is trying to find out new ways of producing high-energy gamma rays with 50 other scientists says, ‘We predicted that the lifetime of this special kind of beam inside the LHC would be at least 15 hours. We were surprised to learn the lifetime could be as much as about 40 hours. Now the question is whether we can preserve the same beam lifetime at a higher intensity by optimizing the collimator settings, which were still set-up for protons during this special run.’

These test runs were carried out so that one day they can fulfil the Gamma Factory project of producing gamma rays by shooting ‘atoms’ with a laser. The gamma rays can then be used to produce ‘normal’ matter particles like quarks, and electrons. Thinking about the long-term future, these tests show that maybe one day these gamma rays could even produce dark matter or be used to make a muon (heavy electron) beam. Watch this space.

This article was adapted from an article published by CERN.