Lead Atoms In The Large Hadron Collider
The bread and butter of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are protons. But that doesn’t mean that sometimes it doesn’t tackle something a bit more heavy. Recently it tried out lead atoms.
Vue du tunnel du LHC, secteur 3-4
By Maximilien Brice, CERN (CERN Document Server) CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The physicists and engineers from CERN like to investigate new ideas that could introduce new avenues of research. Normally they smash one pair of high-energy protons into another one all the time. But once in a while, they like to try something new. In the past, it was xenon atoms but now they tried lead atoms with a single electron.
This is because they are trying to find a new way to produce high-energy gamma radiation. And part of that is having fast single-electron atoms of lead. But it’s not easy. Such particles are very fragile as they can easily lose they single electron. And when it happens they immediately smash into the walls of the accelerator because their electromagnetic charge isn’t tuned in with the LHC’s magnetic field.
During the first round, the scientists first injected 24 bunches of atoms of lead and had them circle around for about an hour in a stable low-energy beam. Then, when they increased the power of the LHC to the max it took only two minutes before the system automatically shut down as the particles weren’t stable enough anymore. In their second attempt they used only 6 bunches and this time the system ran for 2 hours before they shut it down manually.
The scientists predict that they could probably keep the beam active for about 40 hours. Now they will be working on keeping the beam stable for longer at higher energies. The motivation behind this was to make LHC into a factory that will make high-energy gamma radiation. And since energy and matter are just two sides of one coin there is a chance that if we create extremely high-energy gamma rays that they could “swap” creating some high-mass particles we haven’t seen yet.
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Interesting. It's mind boggling how they manage to do this...