CERN SMASHES POWER RECORDS/1045 Tev _BPEarthWatch

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Two of the great machines of the past were named after the symbolic energy barrier that they broke. The Bevatron (for “billions of electron volts synchrotron”), at Berkeley in 1954, was the first to break the barrier of a billion electron volts (now known as a giga-electron volt or GeV) in the centre-of-mass, by enough to create the first anti-protons in the laboratory (other early synchrotrons, in Birmingham and Brookhaven, accelerated beams to GeV-scale energies around the same time).

Three decades later, in 1987, the Tevatron at Fermilab breached the barrier of 1 tera-electron volt or TeV, a trillion electron-volts or 1000 GeV, in the centre-of-mass. This was thanks to the use of superconducting magnets, colliding beams rather than fixed targets and, of course, the beautiful mathematics of the strong-focussing principle. Together, these made large rings of moderate-sized high-field magnets affordable*. The Tevatron beam energy itself was almost 1 TeV, yielding almost 2 TeV in the collisions of opposing beams.

Earlier this year, the LHC broke its own previous record by colliding protons at 13 TeV in the centre-of-mass, thanks to even higher-field magnets and an even larger ring. Its previous 7-8 TeV, before the improvements of the first long shutdown, was enough to create the Higgs boson.

This week, just under three decades since the Tevatron reached 1 TeV, the LHC resumed its programme of colliding so-called “heavy ions”. More precisely, these are the nuclei of lead atoms. Since these nuclei contain the electric charges of 82 protons, the machine can accelerate them to 82 times the energy**, reaching 1045 TeV in the collisions, breaking the symbolic barrier of a quadrillion electron-volts, or 1 PeV (peta-electron volt ). http://home.cern/about/opinion/2015/1…