{"id":216986,"date":"2025-07-02T02:12:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T07:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/first-ever-collisions-of-oxygen-at-the-large-hadron-collider"},"modified":"2025-07-02T02:12:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T07:12:40","slug":"first-ever-collisions-of-oxygen-at-the-large-hadron-collider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/first-ever-collisions-of-oxygen-at-the-large-hadron-collider","title":{"rendered":"First-ever collisions of oxygen at the Large Hadron Collider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/first-ever-collisions-of-oxygen-at-the-large-hadron-collider.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe current operating mode, in which a beam of protons collides with a beam of oxygen ions, is the most challenging,\u201d points out Roderik Bruce, an LHC ion specialist. \u201cThis is because the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electromagnetic+field\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electromagnetic field<\/a> inside the accelerator affects protons and oxygen ions differently, due to their different charge-to-mass ratios. In other words, without corrections the two beams would collide in different places at each turn.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To overcome this problem, the engineers are carefully adjusting the frequency of revolution and the momentum of each beam, so that the collisions take place right at the heart of the LHC\u2019s four main experiments: <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/experiments\/alice\" target=\"_blank\">ALICE<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/experiments\/atlas\" target=\"_blank\">ATLAS<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/experiments\/cms\" target=\"_blank\">CMS<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/experiments\/lhcb\" target=\"_blank\">LHCb<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But these four experiments are not the only ones to be involved in this special campaign. Last week, the <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/experiments\/lhcf\" target=\"_blank\">LHCf<\/a> experiment, which studies cosmic rays using the small-angle particles created during collisions, installed a detector along the LHC beamline, 140 meters from the ATLAS experiment\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/collision\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">collision<\/a> point, which it will use for proton\u2013oxygen run. This detector will later be removed and replaced by a calorimeter, which will provide additional data during the oxygen\u2013oxygen and neon\u2013neon collisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe current operating mode, in which a beam of protons collides with a beam of oxygen ions, is the most challenging,\u201d points out Roderik Bruce, an LHC ion specialist. \u201cThis is because the electromagnetic field inside the accelerator affects protons and oxygen ions differently, due to their different charge-to-mass ratios. In other words, without corrections [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}