There's been a flurry of news coverage in the last 24 hours about successful particle collisions taking place at the delay-plagued Large Hadron Collider in Europe (specifically at a facility known as CERN). However, as I discussed last November, the present activity is taking place at only half the particle energy ultimately intended for the LHC (3.5 TeV instead of 7). As today's New York Times reports:
The success in producing proton collisions represents a remarkable comeback for CERN, but the lab is still only halfway back to where it wanted to be. Only a year and a half ago, the first attempt to start the collider ended with an explosion that left part of its tunnel enveloped in frigid helium gas and soot when an electrical connection between two of the powerful magnets that steer the protons vaporized...
Because of the defective joints and some mysteriously underperforming magnets, it will still be three years at least before CERN’s collider runs at or near full strength. According to theoretical models, that would stretch out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing the Higgs boson and testing more exotic ideas like extra dimensions.
Until then, the Tevatron [at Fermilab near Chicago] will chase CERN for big goals like the Higgs boson, physicists say. The CERN experimenters will spend the next four to six months learning how their detectors work and rediscovering known physics. Then, anything is possible...
A blog from ATLAS, one of the experimenter groups within the LHC, provides some initial reactions from the attending physicists to last night's collisions (via Not Even Wrong).