There’s no doubt that protons will be the stars of the show when the LHC switches on this morning. But in all the fuss it’s easy to forget that the machine is designed to carry other particles too.
So Paolo Giubellino at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Turin, Italy, outlines what to expect next year when the machine starts smashing together nuclei of lead. The idea is to reproduce the conditions that existed in the first three minutes after the Big Bang.
Giubellino is unusually optimistic about the results. He says that every new generation of heavy ion collider as immediately produced revolutionary data and, in a strange application of logic, says we should therefore expect the same from the LHC
“The first results obtainable with Heavy-Ion beams at the LHC will qualify it as a discovery machine, capable to provide fundamental new insight to our knowledge of high-density QCD matter“
Let’s hope he’s not tempting fate.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0809.1062: Heavy Ion Physics at the LHC