29 July 2010
The proton as seen by the TOTEM experiment
Two protons have collided head-on in the LHC and scattered like two billiard balls, leaving tracks (shown in blue) in some of TOTEM's detectors (grey) located 220m from the interaction point (IP5).
TOTEM, one of the smaller experiments at the LHC, has recently recorded the first signals of proton-proton elastic scattering at a collision energy of 7 TeV. It is the first time that such data has been made available to researchers at such high energy. Studying the elastic scattering between two protons is a powerful way of exploring the inner structure of the proton, one of the most common, yet still poorly understood, particles we observe in Nature.
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