CERN announced on Monday, November 8 that the LHC’s first collisions with lead ions have been recorded. The transition from proton collisions to lead ion collisions was a smooth process which involved extracting the final proton beam and circulating lead ion beams at accelerating energies. Lead ions are atoms of lead that have all of their electrons stripped off during the acceleration process.
With the new transition to lead comes the hope of producing the quark-gluon plasma, tiny quantities of matter that scientists believe existed only millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Producing this would help scientists better understand how and why quarks and gluons form more complex particles.
“The LHC’s lead-ion collisions may generate temperatures up to 500,000 times hotter than the center of the sun,” said Timothy Hallman, Associate Director of Science for Nuclear Physics at the US Department of Energy.
While three experiments – ALICE, ATLAS and CMS – will rely on the lead ion collisions for data, the ALICE experiment will especially benefit from the transition, since it was specifically designed to record heavy-ion collisions.
The LHC’s new run will only last about the month. After that it will be shut down for maintenance and restarted in February 2011.
