With support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division is building a test facility for the superconducting magnets of the future. The Large Dipole Facility will provide a critical research tool for testing potential new materials including high-temperature superconductors. Despite their promise, the new materials pose plenty of problems and challenges.

Beams of protons were brought together in the first focused collisions on Tuesday, March 30, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The world’s record collisions open a new realm of high-energy physics.

After more than a year of repairs, the Large Hadron Collider located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland is back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

The ALICE detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will study the fireballs that result when energetic lead ions collide, recreating conditions like those when the universe was just a millionth of a second old. An ALICE instrument called EMCal will signal the most interesting events. Designed by an international collaboration spearheaded by scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab and other U.S. institutions, EMCal is now on its way to completion.

At 1:25 a.m. Pacific Time an international collaboration of scientists in Switzerland sent the first beam of protons zooming at nearly the speed of light around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers were among the contributors to the giant machine.

Contact: Paul Preuss
CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, is headquartered in Geneva and occupies regions of both Switzerland and France, but in addition to its European members, countries around the world including the U.S. and Japan have made substantial contributions to CERN’s giant new accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will inject its first [...]

1) Long Racetrack Magnets go the Distance
2) Super Test Results for a Superconducting Magnet

Contacts: Katie Yurkewicz, katie.yurkewicz@cern.ch
Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

The first item below is by Katie Yurkewicz, Ph.D. in nuclear physics, who handles press and public inquiries for United States participation in the Large Hadron Collider (US/LHC) at CERN, the [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

The international ATLAS collaboration — numbering 1,800 participants from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 34 countries — recently reelected Michael Barnett of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Erik [...]