Big Bang Machine Turns It Up to Eleven (Okay, 3.5)

Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Monday, Mar 22, 2010

Forget about destroying the earth with a black hole: the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s massive attempt to explore the roots of the universe, is going to overwhelm us with its constant breakage of records. The atom smasher’s latest milestone: it has been wound up to an unprecedented level of power – 3.5 TeV, or 3.5 trillion electron volts – in its search for what makes matter matter.

After our visit to the massive machine last year (see the video above), the LHC eclipsed the record of the next most powerful machine, the Tevatron at Chicago’s Fermilab, in December. And all of this record-breaking serves as a stinging reminder of what more the US could have done: the Superconducting Supercollider, America’s own attempt at a Big Bang machine in Texas, died under red tape and budget cuts. Be careful asking Neil deGrasse Tyson about that.

After a series of collision experiments over the next 18 – 24 months, the system will be shut down (yup, again) and refitted so that it can handle photon beams running at 7 TeV, more than double the current power.

Read our interview with the spokesman for the collider, and see more of our obsessive LHC coverage.