The LHC, located at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN, www.cern.ch) near Geneva (Switzerland) will be inaugurated in October. It is a 27-km circular accelerator built in an underground tunnel. On 22 August the last synchronization test of the accelerator elements was performed. The test was also used to send the first particle beam in one of the LHC’s four main experiments, the LHC beauty experiment (LHCb). Groups from the UB and the Universitat Ramon Llull took part in this trial, which investigates the symmetry between matter and anti-matter through the analysis of the B particles. The joint UB/URL team supervised the operation of the SPD sub-detector, one of the subsystems of the LHCb, for which they designed the data acquisition electronics. This system managed to detect the first particle beams of the accelerator injection test. The SPD’s electronic signal served as the trigger to detect the existence of particles and allowed the subsequent reconstruction of their tracks through the most sensitive and technologically advanced subsystem of the LHCb, the Vertex Locator, or VELO. The UB team travelled to Geneva to participate in the LHCb experiment and monitored the operation of the SPD from the control centre.

With this equipment it is possible to accelerate subatomic particles up to speeds approaching the speed of light. The LHC will be able to accelerate proton beams to nearly 99.99% the speed of light and will collide protons at an energy of 14 TeV, a figure never previously achieved in an accelerator. This new supercollider will broaden our knowledge of elementary particles, the fundamental constituents of matter, and will help recreate the conditions that existed immediately after the Big Bang. The study of the data obtained from the four LHC experiments will also shed light on questions such as how particles acquire their mass, or which particles make up dark matter (dark matter is believed to be abundant in the universe but its composition is currently unknown). Specifically, the LHCb experiment will help answer one of the open questions in physics today: why anti-matter seems to have disappeared almost completely from the universe, when, shortly after the Big Bang, it is believed that the same amounts of matter and anti-matter would have existed.

The next landmark in the development of the LHC was achieved on 10 September, when the first proton beam was successfully steered around the full accelerator circle at the injection energy of 0.45 TeV.
For more information:
www.lhc.cat