Prof. Giora Mickenberg from the Weizmann Institute at the LHC facility: Now the real project begins

According to Mickenberg, although the experiment conducted yesterday (Tuesday) at the LHC was modest in terms of the number of proton packages and when each package contained only a hundredth of the number of protons required to derive scientific benefit, it indicates that the system is ready

For Prof. Giora Mickenberg, perhaps a veteran of the Israeli researchers at the CERN facility in Geneva, the night between Monday and Tuesday was not like all nights and not only because of Seder night. Prof. Mickenberg from the Weizmann Institute waited almost all night for the start of the first collisions, activating the particle accelerator with a power of 3.5 tera electron volts per beam - half of the maximum power, a power that the researchers will be content with in the next two years. The experiments were scheduled for three in the morning. In the end he had to wait until a few minutes after one o'clock in the afternoon local time to participate in a champagne toast with friends from all over the world.

In a conversation with the Hidan website, Mikenberg explains what the malfunctions were: "There were several malfunctions in the activation of the beams when they tried to speed them up around half past five in the morning. The first malfunction was an electrical fault that ended up requiring the system to be rebooted. At eight, two faults occurred at the same time and it took a while before they were able to understand what was happening. When they realized they started inserting beams without collisions and they worked fine. In the end around one past five the collisions arrived and we were able to pick up 40-50 collisions per second on our devices. We saw that all the components of the experiment work correctly, including the Israeli components.

"There was a complete celebration. Battles put up screens so we could see what was happening in the central control room of the accelerator and the other experiments and then it was filmed for television and broadcast everywhere a spokesperson for each experiment comes to the control room of the accelerator with a bottle of champagne. There was great joy, but now the real project begins. collect data.”

It turns out that the purpose of today's experiment was mainly to test the system, and it will be very difficult to derive any scientific benefit from it because it was negligible in terms of the volume of colliding protons. In terms of energy, we have reached the maximum energy that will be used by us for the next two years." In terms of the accelerated protons, there was a very small number. 1,100 packs of 10 to the power of 11 protons are supposed to run inside the accelerator. In today's experiment, two packages were run in total, each containing five times ten in a ninth of protons (5 billion), half a percent of what should have been in each package and approximately 2 thousandths of the number of packages. Now we need to improve the number of collisions per second so that we can give answers from the data that will be collected, even then it will be partial due to the fact that the accelerator is operating at half its power."

"But don't get me wrong, the fact that we were able to accelerate these packages to maximum energy and cleanly transfer them to a state of collisions without unnecessary losses with a lifetime of about 100 hours per beam had no losses is a huge advance. This means that the accelerator is tuned correctly and furthermore, in the last year and a half that the accelerator was not working, we had opportunities to understand thanks to the cosmic radiation the instruments of the experiment and we were ready for this moment and for what will come in the future.

More on the subject on the science website

• Third time ice cream - after several failures, the scientists managed to activate the particle accelerator with a power of 3.5 tera electron volts in each beam (April 30, 2010)
• The particle accelerator is back in operation after a long outage
• A tour of the particle accelerator in Geneva and an interview with Prof. Shlomit before the Technion
• The particle accelerator is safe to use