Trillions of Reasons to Be Excited

SUPERPOWER Superconducting electromagnets power the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underground at the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.

By DENNIS OVERBYE
NYT

CESSY, France — It was late on an August evening when the proton wranglers at the Large Hadron Collider finally got five trillion high-energy particles under control, squeezed and tweaked them into tight bunches and started banging them together.

“Seven minutes too late,” grumbled Darin Acosta, a physicist from the University of Florida, whose shift running a control room here, among sunflower fields and strip malls, had just ended. On the walls around him, computer screens were suddenly blooming with multicolored streaks and curling tracks depicting the primordial subatomic chaos of protons colliding 300 feet under his feet, in the bowels of the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the four giant particle detectors buried around the collider ring.

A dozen or so physicists crowded around the screens, calling out the names of particles on the fly, trying to guess what others, as yet unknown to physics, were spraying from the mess in the middle, looking to see some sign from the universe. “This is way cool,” one of them said.

“There’s a muon,” somebody else said as a spike darted out and into the void. “There’s a jet.”

(More here.)