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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."
They are getting ready to see the universe born again.
It's like having a Tivo with a 6,000 year replay capacity!
Trolling is a art,
"Above is one of the collider's massive particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid"
I'd hate to see the Large Muon Solenoid!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
I don't even want to think about a hardon supercollider.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
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
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
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.
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.
Who ordered that?
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.
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.
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?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
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
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.)
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
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...
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
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.
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
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.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
(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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere