A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider

davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."

Comments

Cool

[grub]

They are getting ready to see the universe born again.

It's like having a Tivo with a 6,000 year replay capacity!

Re:Cool

[sentientbeing]

Theyre stating the obvious about the daily workwear though, I thought.
 
- When youre creating a captive mini black hole on Earth I would have thought hard hats and steel toecapped boots would be a MINIMUM safety requirement.

Re:Cool

[CelticWhisper]

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH...

Re:Cool

[Cervantes]

It's like having a Tivo with a 6,000 year replay capacity! Great! That'll be JUST enough time for the writers of Lost to figure out a coherent plot line!

Re:Cool

[Enlightenment]

It's not. It's measured in electron volts. 1 electron volt is equal to the charge on an electron (absolute value) times 1 volt. A volt is a unit of energy per unit charge, so (Energy/Charge)*Charge = Energy. Or if you want to know it in joules, 1 Volt = 1 Joule/Coulomb and the charge on an electron is 1.60*10^-19 Coulombs, so 1 eV = 1.60*10^-19 Joules. So that means they're measuring mass in terms of energy--which is fine, if you remember your Einstein.

Compact?!

[TheWoozle]

"Above is one of the collider's massive particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid"

I'd hate to see the Large Muon Solenoid!

Thank goodness there's no typo

[Nimey]

I don't even want to think about a hardon supercollider.

Re:Thank goodness there's no typo

[Anonymous Coward]

For a minute, I thought "Hardon Super Collider" was the name of the Japanese version of "America's Funniest Home Videos".

The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Nom du Keyboard]

The problem with something this expensive is that the average person, including myself, cannot see, even if it provides every answer they hope for it, how that will change my everyday life in the least. At least the Space Program gave us Tang.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Jamu]

The expense of Physics isn't a problem until it's unaffordable. Physics has always been profitable in the long term, and survives because it's profitable in the short term. And Physics gave you the Space Program.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[qc_dk]

Well, you used something that came from the CERN collaboration to write your question. I would say that WWW has certainly changed the daily life of almost all of us, and the economic boom that it caused through the 90s has certainly been a bountiful repayment of our investment.

Cheers,
Qc_dk
Ps. I used to work at cern and with the 10'000 men and 2 women there, there certainly was a lot of large hardon collisions. I believe you USians call it cockblocking. ;)

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Loki_1929]

Pure science has no marketable goals in mind. What will the discovery of new particles bring to the world? No one knows, just as no one knew the consequences of the discovery of the electron in 1897. Yet we now have a world where the bulk of the economy is built upon knowing its properties and behavior. Pure science brings about quiet revolutions in unpredictable ways, and those who recognize that realize that funding it is vital to progress. You mention the space program giving us Tang; have you any idea how many commercial products have come about as a direct result of the space program? Any idea of the lives saved and the progress achieved through the struggles brought about by our venturing into space?

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[wanerious]

I'm not trying to be offensive, but that sounds like a remarkably egotistic statement. Should it be required to change your life in any way for you to care about it? Rather than something being wrong with the experiment in that it has no intersection with your interests, perhaps the problem is that your interests are too narrow to accommodate something that (I'd argue) is objectively interesting by any measure. Here is an opportunity for the average person to learn something about the fundamental nature of the Universe to understand the results.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Somnus]

To me endeavors like this are the most perfect expression of man. Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions,

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

To plunge into the unknown is a moral imperative for any thinking being.

If all you care about are material practicalities, this thing is roughly 1/50th the current cost of a certain misadventure in the Middle East, and is more likely to produce cool stuff. One particularly exciting bit of technology already is the LHC's grid computing infrastructure.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Ambitwistor]

The Large Hadron Collider likely will not change your everyday life, unless you're really into physics. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to help the human race learn more about the natural world in which we live.

Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?

Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.

Pastore: Nothing at all?

Wilson: Nothing at all.

Pastore: It has no value in that respect?

Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are
we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

— at the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

for me, it's good enough that the biggest machine on earth does not work for either the military or some corporation, but for the whole of mankind, for future generations and for all of us. that's a very nice thought, i think.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Dirtside]

Tang was created in 1957 or so, and had nothing to do with the space program until they started using it during Gemini.

That aside, the answer to your question is that we don't know what we're going to learn from projects like this. But we do fundamental research like this anyway, for a variety of reasons best expressed by this article.

"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

...energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts...

So that means the LHC only uses 2.24 microjoules? Is that per second or per fortnight?

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[phaunt]

From TFA:

Everything about the collider sounds, well, large -- from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy with which it will smash together protons (...)

So that energy is not the consumption (which would be more usefully measured in Watts anyway, as you point out), but the energy the particles have when they collide (which is usually measured in (T)eV).

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[Jamu]

Or to put it another way: the LHC is not 100% efficient and can't be powered with a single postgrad and a bicycle generator. The true power consumption of the LHC will be about 120 MW.

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[Mr2cents]

Hmm.. I thought that each proton would be accelerated to 7 TeV, so when they collide there is a 14 TeV collision. In any case, "energy consumption" is the wrong term.

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[anzev]

This really is a strange figure. It might reference anything but the consumption, most notably, the "energy" inside the ring. Or maybe the consumption of ONLY the ring itself, becaue when you start looking at the magnets, and vacuum pumps, and control system infrastructure you quickly find out that you need to be connected to at least 2 power grids :-). At least that's the case with DESY if I remember correctly.

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[Rich0]

I hate to be pedantic, but I think a given electron crosses the property line in your direction once every cycle - not half-cycle.

Let's start a zero voltage with the electron right on the border of your property. The voltage rises to 110/220, and the electron moves towards your house and you "buy" it. Voltage drops to zero and it comes to a halt inside your house somewhere. Voltage drops to -110/220 and the electron moves away from your house. Voltage rises to zero just as the electron crosses your property line and is "returned" to the utility. Thus completes one cycle.

The same logic applies wherever the electron starts out.

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Mine bills in tachyons, they are charging me for energy I haven't used yet!

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[cyberanth]

It means the particles in the collider are accelerated up to 14TeV; energy is the relevant parameter in high energy physics, strangely enough. If the Higgs weighs 140 GeV for instance, we need to accelerate particles in the collider to more than that energy to produce one.

17 miles.

[foodnugget]

seventeen miles? I went to look at the pictures, but i don't see anything that comes close to seventeen miles. Certainly, i don't doubt it, but not knowing much about particle accelerators and supercolliders, i am very curious to get the big picture. If something is seven-teen-miles long, or around, or deep or high, wow, do i really want to see it. or an overlay of it on a map if it is underground!

Perhaps it is just the structural engineer side of me, but i would love to know more about how they made something that large.

We don't need no stinkin' Higgs

[sweetser]

Sorry Charlie, the animations of the Standard Model are up on YouTube, http://youtube.com/watch?v=ExNPiMcVXww

U(1) is a unit circle in the complex plane. SU(2) is a unit quaternion which is easy to animate if you have software for the job (barf out thousands of exp(q-q*), sort by time, drive through POVRay). Electroweak is the product of the first two. The animation of SU(3) tells you what the standard model is about, namely the ability to smoothly describe any event seen by an observer at 0,0,0,0. Gravity is about the sizes of things, so scale the ball to different sizes in a smooth way, and that is the symmetry behind gravity.

It is inertial mass that breaks the symmetry of standard model, not some phony Mexican hat dance around a false god of a vacuum.

doug

BETTER HADRON COVERAGE

[mattnyc99]

This stuff is pretty cool, but The New Yorker's incredible science writer (who basically told the rest of the world about global warming) had a more in-your-face profile of the LHC last week, and Popular Mechanics has officially dubbed it "The World's Biggest Science Project." Sweet.

/. does it again!

[perturbed1]

There are more mistakes in the /. gist than in the NYTimes article -- which incidentally is a good summary for the LHC. Well, the writer was at CERN about a month ago, so I am assuming it took about that long to write it.

It is called the LHC -- Large Hadron Collider. Not the Hadron SuperCollider. The SuperCollider is dead. It was called the SSC. But it has passed on. It has ceased to be! It has expired and gone to meet its maker! Its a stiff! Bereft of line and rests in peaces in TX! It's kicked the bucket and shuffled off its mortal coil! (Gee. I wish I could write this about the M$! Grrr!!)

The energy consumption is 14 trillion electron volts?! Wt..? Last time, I checked the LHC could not run on days where the electricity prices were high. Actually, it can not run during winter for that reason. It and the detectors consume as much energy as you get out from a medium-sized nuclear reactor -- and that's why it sits partially in France and not fully in Switzerland. (France produces a whole lot more power than Switzerland.)

"The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. " Huh? What expected experiments? The experiments have been in construction now for seven years. You mean expected results?!

Honestly, how many mistakes can you make in one paragraph??

Sorry about the rant, but I am so annoyed with the latest reports about M$'s threats, that I had to vent. I feel better now. Slightly.

Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY?

[DirtySouthAfrican]

Ignoring that a TeV is a unit of energy and not power, that's about 2e-6 joules... a flea sneezes more energetically than that. They mean that individual particles can reach this energy. Actual power consumption is probably enough to power a dozen DeLoreans.

Re:Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY?

[Oink]

Actually, what you said is not quite correct either. That's the center of mass collisional energy. Individual particles can reach half that, or 7 TeV.

There's a youtube of their IT manager

[porkThreeWays]

There's a youtube video out there (I really wish I could find it) and it has the IT manager for the project. I have to wonder a little bit about him because he was asked why they didn't go with the cell processor instead of Intel based processors. His answer was "The P4's have better floating point processing". I could understand a lot of reasons to go with the P4 because there are a lot of good x86 programmers out there and they could reuse a lot of code etc etc. Has anyone else seen this video?

Re:There's a youtube of their IT manager

[Axello]

I would think with a project that's 7 years in the making, that they settle on a stable technology in an early stage. Cell processors are nice, but were they available, oh let's say: last summer?

The early stages of the analysis are often in dedicated hardware, because general purpose processors are not fast enough. You need to connect those systems together as well. Then you need to debug these software beasts, since they need to make a good mathematical analysis 30 million times a second. And with 7000 people waiting for results, you don't want to be caught with a bug...

One more thing on processors:
There's always a better processor on the horizon. Wasn't it NASA that still uses 8086 processors in their Space Shuttle?

Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision

[perturbed1]

14 TeV is the amount of energy that is in a collision from two 7TeV beams colliding. In this case, the beam means particles (protons) accelerated to carry 7TeV of momentum. But that's just one "particle". The LHC, there are many "buckets" of particles being stored and collided and the total stored energy around the whole ring is 360MegaJoules. It is fairly easy to calculate actually:

There are 2808 bunches around the ring, each containing 1.15x10^{11} protons each with 7TeV of momentum. 7TeV = 7x10^{12} x 1.602x10^{-19} Joules. You multiply it all out, you get 362MegaJoules stored in the beam around the LHC ring.

That's 1 small cruise ship of 10,000 tons moving at 30km/hour.

450 automobioles of 2tons moving at 100km/hour.

Is enough to melt 500kg of copper. (which is actually a worry if the beams "are lost" due to a magnet quench and they hit the vacuum pipe!)

Oh, btw, the power consumption of the LHC only (excluding the detectors) is ~120MW.

Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision

[perturbed1]

Err.... Actually, this power does not go into the electromagnets directly. The electromagnets happen to be superconducting magnets, which, once powered, do not require more current. That's not where the power goes. The power goes into keeping it cool. 18kW of synchrotron radiation is dumped into the cryogenics system. The syncrotron radiation is due to the relativistic charged particles curving under the influence of the magnetic fields, but this dumped energy needs to be extracted before it results in a quench. A quench is defined as a superconducting magnet, which has no resistivity, transitioning into the resistive phase, due to the temperature rising locally above the critical point. Here is an interesting link to the power budget of CERN: link As you will see, the LHC eats up little power (given its size) compared to the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) which has conventional magnets and has much smaller radius. The SPS delivers 450MeV protons to the LHC, which then accelerates them upto 14TeV. But the SPS eats up more power than the LHC due to its conventional magnets. Hurray for super-conductivity. ps. you may not have realized this, but might like to know that your post resulted in an excited discussion in at least one CERN corridor...

Re:Sexist/Agist

[chribo]

The quoto from the article is definitly wrong. Should be:
"the physics is complex, but the controls are so simple, even a theoretical physicist can use it." ;)
- chribo

Re:Sexist/Agist

[Oink]

I don't know if that's the inside joke I think it is, but I think you're way off base. The theoretical physicists we've had briefly in our lab (for requisite graduate student lab experience) couldn't handle anything more complicated than a pencil! One of them used a gallon jug of acetone to clean something the size of a quarter (exaggerating, but only slightly.)

I don't get it.

[teal_]

Let me be the first to admit that I don't understand how this works. Will the mass of Slashdot users who pretend to understand follow suit, or will they shun me? :)

Pictures of the "mundane" parts here

[iamlucky13]

Here is a map showing the layout of the LHC. It actually consists of two rings and a couple of linear accelerator stages so they aren't injecting cold particles into the high energy beam. Keep in mind, the main ring is 17 miles around and about 100 meters underground. A lot of the people living inside its circumference probably don't actually realize what's going on underneath their feet, other than the various CERN campuses spread around the ring and all the nerdy looking people going in and out. In fact, there will be millions of particles whizzing around the track at ~99.9999% the speed of light...circling the entire distance 10,000 times a second.

What you see in the NY Times slide show is basically the most impressive parts of the LHC, the incredibly complex and massive detectors assembled in huge underground vaults. The remainder, while still fairly complicated and interesting, is orders of magnitude simpler.

The rest of the collider is mostly a 3 meter diameter tunnel (pic), which has a track for getting people and equipment around it as needed, and the beam conduit. The physical tunnel is being reused from an older collider that was retired in 2000 to make way for this one, and I presume was dug with a tunnel boring machine.

The conduit (CAD rendering) itself is more than just a pipe. The most important part is the two vacuum pipes inside that the beam runs through, and the 9,000+ magnets around the pipes that electromagnetically constrain and accellerate the particles so they follow the 17 mile loop instead of smashing uselessly into the walls. It also contains the electrical lines that power the magnets, and helium lines that keep them cool. Some stray collisions are expected, so it also contains a little bit of radiation shielding, although I don't believe people are supposed to be in the tunnel when it is operating.

More Pictures
LHC Outreach Page
Map showing cities and Swiss/French border

Corrected summary

[l0b0]

Circumference = 27 kilometers (~17.5 miles), cost = 8 billion USD (presumably, and only for the construction), energy consumption = ~120 MW, particle energy = 14 TeV.

More interesting statistics are available on the LHC outreach site.

What a half-assed attempt at a submission. Even the title is a mix between the SSC and the LHC.

Re:Please stop talking about power/energy!

[treeves]

No. 14TeV is the energy of a single hadron, not the energy involved on the whole LHC.

So if the beam had a current of 1 amp (1 Coulomb / sec) then the energy of the particles in the beam would be 6.241×10^18 * 7x10^-13 = 4.3*10^6 kW*Hr. That's a lot of energy, and I'm guessing the beam currents are MUCH less than 1 amp. BTW, power = energy / time or work / time.

Mods are clueless on this one.

Flying Cars

[bill_mcgonigle]

how that will change my everyday life

You're going to get a flying car, OK?

Well, maybe. See, the LHC is going to be able to smash things at the Weak Scale energy, which is where we need to look (at what comes out of smashed things) to pick among many theories of how the universe works. Depending on the results, dozens of models will be ruled out, and, if we're lucky, one will be left standing.

This model will likely contain a theory of quantum gravity. We have lots of ideas about how quantum physics and gravity might align, but we don't know which, if any, are right.

Now, to make your flying car is going to require some engineering work. That'll have to figure out how to cancel out gravity. Nobody knows if this is possible or if we can do it, but if we can and it is we're going to have to know how gravity works first.

So the LHC is the first step to getting you a flying car. I'm just not sure that we want people who judge 'basic science is worthless' to be making flight judgments in flying cars.

Does not compute

[StikyPad]

(size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts)

For the old school among us, that's 59,840 cubits, 370 metric tons of gold, and 1.18170471 x 10^-19 foot pounds, respectively.

Or about 3 Libraries of Congress accelerating at about 1.72 x 10^-183 m/s/s.