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World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion
evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."
Watch out for leftover jaggedy fragments of atoms. And if CERN gets involved, there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Somebody wake Jodie Foster up, the machine is nearly ready!
liqbase
To whom it conCERNs.
The world seems to be more complex than just wired up.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
when you hear a rising call from their labs...Quarrk, Quarrkk, Quark!
Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet? Maybe a little sightseeing on the ISS would be a good idea about that time. That would buy me a couple extra weeks.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I was wondering when we'd have the equipment to smash the world's largest atom!
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I hear they're trying to pass a law in congress defining a traditional meson as being between one quark and one anti-quark.
HEP research in the United States is grinding to a halt. The DOE has nothing on the board for Fermilab, SLAC, etc. past 2010. While I admire and respect the work the Europeans are doing ( with little help from the US ), I am deeply concerned that this nation is losing its way. Basic R&D is the foundation that made the US what it was in the 20th century. We are doing less and less of it everyday. Unless the Clowns^H^H^H^H^HEsteemed politicians in Washington wake up soon, the US will soon become a second rate nation.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
So, how long until we discover the mass of the Higgs boson, thus compressing the Earth down to the size of a pea?
Or does it really say "if the information doesn't prove what we want it to, we'll ignore it"?
-"The math alone here is staggering. Somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion collisions will take place each second. Each will leave its mark in the detectors, but the vast majority will be irrelevant to the scientists' goals. Computerized triggers will thus record a specific event only if it matches a predetermined set of conditions, and throw out the rest."
This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home project lets you donate your spare CPU cycles to help calibrate the machine in order to minimize the risk of accidental wall collisions. Come on, I know there must be some physics geeks out there... show your support! Given the sorry state of pure science research in the USA, this may be your only chance...
Physicists are hoping that they will see signs of tiny black holes forming and instantly evaporating. If they can be produced by the energies of the LHC, then they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays, which have far more energy per particle (up to 10^20 eV) than what the LHC can do. (7*10^12 eV). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cos mic_ray
I think he's on his way to completion as well.
Wish I could do it myself.
It may be worth noting that some of the design work on this amazing project was actually done by Slashdot readers with no background in particle accelerators. LHC@home is a distributed computing project using the SixTrack program that helps simulate particles' travel in the accelerator to study the stability of their orbits. It has been critical data to the scientists that have been working on the project.
Paper Pusher
Interesting, no one in this thread has "misspelt" it yet as the large hardon collider.
From the article:
"The LHC will reach an unprecedented level of energy called the Terascale (a trillion electron volts [...] This is unexplored territory, not only because no laboratory has ever reached this high..."
The Tevatron (the largest particle accelerator in the USA) has a CM evergy of 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). That, incidentally, is where it gets its name: the TEVatron.
Because if it doesn't work out, they can use it for a mushroom farm...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
The parent makes a point that should be stressed.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.
Astrophysicist David Lindley wrote The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory, a book that explains the current state of affairs in high-energy physics and astrophysics.
As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.
What is unfortunate is that the superconducting super collider, cancelled 13 (!!) years ago, would have had an energy level nearly three times higher than the LHC. Had it not been canceled in favor of the ISS, it would have been completed by now and working to answer the questions of the universe. The U.S. is losing (already lost?) its edge.
Pitty they will be patented. I mean even if they are in the public domain. Someone will try.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
A good read...and reread...and rereread....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
What do the kitten scientists say, "Muon, muon"?
The HEP community was one of the first large scale users of Linux. Bob Young, of RedHat fame, even credits Fermilab for some of the earliest momentum in the adoption of Linux by "serious" users.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The article says the collider should be able to duplicate conditions just after the Big Bang. We're only guessing about conditions after the Big Bang and we don't know what caused the event. So how do we know they won't reproduce conditions just before the Big Bang? Oops... At least in Schild's Ladder, civilization had time to run like hell.
They've got a machine to smash cesium, the largest atom? No wonder it's taking so long to smash such a large particle.
--
make install -not war
The reason why research is slowly grinding to a halt in the United States is because the people of the United States have finaly realized that you do not have to spend billions of dollars to get the answers to 'life the universe and every thing else". Just go to the holy book of your choice. The answers are all there.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Who came up with the name like Hadron for the elementary particles? What was s/he thinking?
That would be the cow scientists.
Before you go rushing off, a word of warning... LHC@Home is just barely this side of an being an ex-parrot. With the near completion of the magnet system, work come in spurts with considerable time between them. (If you already run BOINC, it's quite suitable as a side project. If you don't already run BOINC, please consider also running one of the other available projects.)
"Aren't we supposed to place a bag over our heads or something?"
"If you like."
"Will that help?"
"No, not at all..."
Six years ago as an undergrad at UIUC my first college job was in the Physics lab assembling the calorimeter submodules as part of the Atlas Tilecal project. It was boring, physical labor, scrubbing, sanding and stacking the metal plates but it's neat to think that I played a (extremely) small part in the assembly of the LHC!
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
Perhaps that was 3 quarks for muster mark?
As it will finally explain where all my other socks are.
Task Mangler
... those linear feedback shift register particles that are responsible for the pseudo-random decay of radioactive materials.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
If the World's Largest Atom Smasher is nearing completion, I hope they already have the world's largest atom ready to smash!
IANAP (though I do have a BS in Physics), but I've been tossing this idea around for a few years and thought I'd share with slashdot:
Cosmic rays contain energies up to 10^20 eV (source: Oh-My-God Particle) whereas the LHC will only have an available energy of 10^13 eV (14 TeV, source: LHC). It seems to me that 10 million times higher energy will be difficult to achieve (read: impossible without at least Type I Civilization level technology). What if we could, instead, harness the power of these freely occurring cosmic rays?
My idea is simple to say (but very, very hard to do): erect a series of stations in space that use superconducting electromagnets and plasma to create extremely huge magentic fields that can focus large amounts of high energy cosmic rays into a very small volume where they can impact on a target. A spaceborne lab would study the results of each impact. I admit that there would not be *that* many events, and the focussing fields would have to be very, very far away from the lab to deflect the rays meaningfully, but it seems like it might work.
Any actual physicists care to comment?
Sorry, but you are wrong. Looks like there are no 10^20eV events because of the GZK cutoff at 3*10^19. The cutoff takes place because at such energies accelerated protons interact with photons of the relict microwave background, producing pions and losing energy at great rates. There have been experiments [AGASA and Yakutsk stations] that reported existence of events of energies up to 10^21; however the Yakutsk team recently withdrew their statements, claiming that there has been an error in interpretation of results, and AGASA results can be neglected as well, since the Pierre Auger Observatory has already obtained such an amount of data, that should have been there 10^20 events at the rate registered by AGASA, it would have registered several of them already.
Theorists of the world must be crying with happiness now: if the GZK-cutoff wouldn't be detected, they would have to scrap either Big Bang, or the Standard Model, or both.
Why do we need to know what happened at the beginning of the universe? It has no bearing on our lives at all.
Prove it. Prove that the physics that we learn doing such experiments will have no bearing on our lives.
For years, you could say the same thing about quantum mechanics; now, there are increasing numbers of devices that rely on quantum mechanical effects for their operation (see, eg, superconducting quantum interference devices). Also, as I love to remind people in this sort of situation, the laser was sat in research labs for years before anyone thought of a use for it; now I 2 within a few centimetres of me right now, and another 4 elsewhere in my house.
but I can tell you what will happen when we as a massive clump of atoms meet our fate. A black hole, maybe even the one we will more than likely create, will grow larger and larger until it sucks up most of the entire universe, resulting in it reaching critical mass, and creating another big bang, restarting the whole chain of events that we have observed so far.
Hardly an original theory, but unfortunately for you available evidence at the moment seems to point to the universe being open - that is, there won't be any "Big Crunch" as you describe it. If you have compelling evidence to the contrary, please share it - cosmologists everywhere will love you forever.
Trying to look any farther back than the big bang is not only pointless, but also impossible
And a great way to spend an evening in idle speculation.
THERE IS NO REASON TO TAKE EVEN THIS TINY RISK TO FIND OUT HOW WE CAME TO BE.
One of the things that makes us human is our powerful curiosity, our drive to know things. We as a species can no more not seek out this sort of knowledge than we can do without food or sleep. Tell me, what sort of research *would* you allow, given that most practical research starts out as purely theoretical?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Grog smash puny atoms!
There's an awful lot of mentions of "probably" and shouldn't in these theories.
Who actually got the final say that these potential risks were indeed deemed acceptable? I mean, if you are wrong in a case like this, an "I'm sorry" hallmark wouldn't quite cover it...
As a U.S. physicist working at CERN, I can tell you that the U.S. is very much involved with LHC. Although the U.S. is not a member nation of CERN, U.S. people are more 30% of many the major projects in terms of people and money including ATLAS and CMS--according to the pretty pie charts in my building. The only other nation that contributes as much as the U.S. is Russia. As far as the contriubution to the collider itself, I am uncertain, but many of the past high level admins have been American including the a past director.
The labor breakdown is something like this (of couse there is much overlap; these are generalizations):
All: Everyone contributes academically. Every group is multinational.
Russia: Virtually all of the useful manual labor. In the pit, many signs are only in Russian.
A great deal of other functions.
Switzerland/France: Makes the coffee. Cleans the floors. Secretarial work. Building maintenance. Safety. Admin.
U.S.: Reminds everyone that we are on a schedule. Complains that solution X is unpractical. Falls asleep during meetings.
Italy/Germany: Proposes solution X.
If someone could provide some hard numbers that would be great, but remember that money comes from many different places and I would assume much of the U.S. comes from the Unversities.
P.S.: TFA is wrong, Switzerland is not sunny. It is depressingly cloudy most of the year. It is thought to be a contributing factor in Geneva's absurdly high suicide rate.
Spain/France: Provides hot women. Falls asleep after lunch.
because (I admit I am rusty on this) as far as ISS and our sattelites are concerned, it doesn't matter whether all the earth's mass is compress in a black hole or not. Gravity wouldn't change from their POV, as long as they are outside the event horizon.
So the aliens would still find those.
Maybe before we throw the switch, we should launch a small time capsule with a brittanica DVD or a wiki backup, together with an explanation of what we are about to do.
If this experiment goes messily wrong, it will resolve world poverty, trust me.
However
Negative strangelets would be a completely different beast. It's not exactly sure whether they actually exist, or if they would be stable, but if the answer is yes for both questions, they could gobble up earth faster than a miniature black hole, since they would attract matter (positively charged atomic nuclei, mostly) by their electrical charge (negative), which is stronger by several orders of magnitude than the gravitational pull of a micro-micro-black hole.
Physics Today reported a few months ago (don't have the time to look up right now) that Aymar, CERN head, complained about the US not contributing enough to LHC (they're supposed to pay for the construction, but not for the exploitation). I don't know if there have been new developements to this story, but it's certainly been a noticeable (and well noticed) statement.
The Fermilab Tevatron is currently the largest (6.28 Km in circumference) and highest-energy (about 1/7th of the LHC) running accelerator on earth. It will be second when LHC will get up to speed. Size wise LEP (which used to sit where the LHC is being built) detains the record as the largest accelerator with a 26.6 Km circumference (the same that the LHC will have). Oh another interesting fact: these devices often need to keep their magnets pretty cold (colder than outer space!) and use the la largest refrigerators on earth!
Actually, curiosity is an exceedingly rare trait in humans beyond their childhood years. It appears to be a racial trait, and even if it isn't, we raise them to curb their curiosity and school beats the rest out of them. "Curiosity killed the cat" sort of epitomizes the average human's point of view with regards to curiosity. Just like we, as a species, don't like change, learning or having to think for ourselves.
Fortunately, there are a few individuals for whom this is unacceptable, and they run ahead into the undiscovered, eyes wide open. And frequently we reward them by tearing them a new one for thinking and acting differently from the rest of us.
Don't unduly credit humanity.
"So I said, 'Supercollider? I barely know her!
... Then they built the supercollider.'"
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Just to make a precision on what is mentionned in the news: this week, the last superconducting magnet was produced by the assembly site and delivered at CERN. That doesn't mean they are all installed and 'in place'. This will come most probably next year in March. I work at CERN on the Atlas experiment and a few months ago, the number was 60% installed. Although the installation crew is doing a great job, I don't think they would bring this 40% down in less than 2 months.
Customer: "Do I need a computer to use your software?"
The collider definitely falls on the experimental and not the theoretical side of high-energy physics.
I've read that book, the answer seems to be 42.
the use of knowledge is highly overrated
Excuse me?
Care to back that up a little?
No. I said that *lack* of curiosity was a racial trait (that is, intrinsic to humans, at least when they reach maturity). I've only got my experience as an amateur student of human nature (by direct observation) to go by, though.
wtf? So maybe there wouldn't be an actual explosion unless the beam was somehow focused on a single point, but the fact remains the energy output of the beam is NOT trivial, it CAN cause damage to the accelerator wall because the total energy output is "333 MJ per ring" which is hella more than "only one ten-thousandth of a joule", and in order to avoid damage to the accelerator they have to dump that beam into a graphite block, which apparently must be carefully designed and magnetically shielded to ensure it doesn't get too hot. Maybe I was dramatizing it a bit, but the beam most certainly does have enough energy to cause damaging macroscopic effects.
Congradulations, you've managed to get my mostly-informative post modded down and your utter-bullshit post modded up. I don't need the karma; I just wanted people to know that they could help...