Slashdot Mirror
CERN Announces Collider Startup Delay
perturbed1 writes "The 142nd session of the CERN Council saw Organizational Director General Robert Aymar announcing a delay in the activation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The installation will start up in May 2008, taking 'the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier.' Such a delay was foreseen due to the quadrupole accident, which we've previously discussed. This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson, as well as give much needed extra-time for the detectors at CERN to get ready for data taking. Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"
Let's not forget that the Tevatron (Fermilab's big accelerator) is scheduled to be shut down in 2009.
I'd love for the scientists at Fermilab to make this sort of breakthrough before the LHC goes live, as it'd be a huge morale booster for American physicists. Such a high-profile discovery would also attract the attention necessary to help solve the NSF's funding woes.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
....our new artifical blackhole Overlords.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
am actually hoping AGAINST either Fermilab or Cern managing to isolate a Higgs particle.
No, I don't wish any harm to the scientists or their reputations. However, I think it would be fun if Gravity didn't fit so nicely in the Standard Model like everyone is hoping it will.
Having something else, such as a massive Baryon, appear at the energies where the Higgs boson is 'supposed' to be means that scientists all over the world in many disciplines are going to have to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate their theories.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Judging by the fourteen glowing reviews posted since the beginning of this month I'm sure that the launch of the innovative iPhone technology will surely solve all of CERN's problems.
Or at least let them watch YouTube while waiting for repairs.
Three Squirrels
Naturally. You know either where the LHC is located, or when it will start, but not both.
Well, time does slow down when you're moving close to the speed of light ...
A-Bomb
no, really. i'm the tevatron operator today. :-)
Not to worry for Fermilab; we have a nice neutrino program to keep us going for a while. In general everyone here is seriously cranked (in a good way) about CERN coming up. They are going to kick some ass when they crank up the ring. The engineering stats are ... mind boggling.
I am but a lowly glamour-drenched peon and not not a decision maker, but i would be less than surprised if someone came up with a good non-higgsian excuse to keep the tev running after the current run, whether or not we actually find any of the higgeses i made between porkchops today.
disclaimer: i speak for dot.me, not my employer!
As I recall from the last season of Lexx - discovery of the Higgs Boson actually accounts for one of the many ways that a society annihilates itself before they can realize that they are not alone in the universe....
I'd also hope for the non-existence of the Higgs boson. however, all odds are against us.
Really? You have some evidence that the theorists are right? If so please share it with us. Just because nobody has thought of a better model it is by no means proof that one does not exist. The Higgs model really is a beautiful one and I think that we will find it...but in 1904 how many physicists would have bet on the universe having a maximum speed limit as the solution to the non-invariance of Maxwell's equations under Galilean transforms? All it takes is one smart guy to come up with a better model and we'd abandon the Higgs model and say that the new one is the way to go.
Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?
It is unlikely that we will have enough data for a 5-sigma Standard Model Higgs discovery before the LHC turns on. If I remember the plot for the expected Higgs significance correctly the best we can hope for is "3-sigma evidence" unless the Higgs really is right above the current limits (where ALEPH once suggested it was).
However this assumes a Standard Model Higgs. If something called Supersymmetry (SUSY) exists then there are 5 Higgs bosons (two with a charge) and in some areas of SUSY parameter space we can see some of these a lot more easily than the Standard Model Higgs This would also be a LOT more exciting than a Standard Model Higgs!
Sorry I should have included this in the original comment. Here is a link to the original expected Tevatron sensitivity and the updated one. The y axis is the volume of data collected by both experiments i.e. sum of DØ and CDF datasets and the x axis is the mass of the Standard Model Higgs. This is currently limited to be above 114 GeV/c2. The three lines are 5-sigma discovery, 3-sigma evidence and 95% confidence limit if we don't see any Higgs event in that amount of data.
The dip round 160 GeV/c2 mass is because a heavy enough Higgs can decay differently than a lighter one and the different decay is a lot easier to detect above all the other "background" events happening in the detector. We should get 10-20 fb-1 between both experiments by 2009 so, as you can see, unless we do something clever (which had not been thought of at the time the plots were made) or the Higgs is really light we won't get 5-sigma, but 3-sigma is a real possibility.
Physicists get hadrons!
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
Actually a magnetic field is a bad example for a Higgs field precisely because it has both a magnitude and direction. The Higgs field has only a magnitude. A better example would be the temperature map you see in a weather forecast. Everywhere has a temperature value: it has no direction. This is what makes it different from the "aether" (aether had a preferred direction which is why the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved it).
The other weird thing about the Higgs field is that it has its lowest energy density at a non-zero value of the field i.e. it requires energy to lower the Higgs field! Electric and magnetic fields have their lowest energy density when the field strength is zero i.e. it takes energy to make them non-zero.
I think they're just being coy, if they start to use the LHC the experiments won't work since all this quantum particle mumbo jumbo freaks out when you look at it, the only way to get it to work is to ignore it or pretend not to notice it. It was their plan all along.
This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson
Um, shouldn't the Fermilab physicists be busy fixing the broken magnet at CERN? Apparently it was their part that failed..
The Einstein-Davis and Kaluza-Klein theories really make the canonical alternative here - something which should not go unexamined if one wants understanding. Here, spacetime distortions are what classical things are made of. Things have rest mass in this scheme by being red-shifted to an effective halt at or below an event horizon, a black hole. Field sources in this scheme are momentum in a fifth or higher dimension, and sensitivity to a field comes with velocity in that same dimension. There is nothing ad hoc here, the results follow as theorems from the premises (within their proper range of expression).
Quantum mechanics of a new variety, probably loop quantum gravity, is needed to stabilize, or at least describe, this sort of black hole. A quantum creation of the things in question is probably needed to account for the very high momentum to mass ratio.
(It is remarkable that the standard model does not refer to either string theory or gravitation. And, string theory has an imperfect accommodation of gravity, and therefore predicts things contrary to general relativity such as magnetic monopoles, exotic matter, and hot event horizons. To top it all, the master of loop quantum gravity has prohibited consideration of higher dimensions. Without this prohibition, it seems that loop quantum gravity would rule.)
Michael J. Burns
Storing all the data is also a problem. Both of the detectors' data models are larger now than previously thought. This increases the requirements on storage and also the computing power necessary. Not only that, but the computing centers have not ramped up as fast as we thought they would... May sounds like a reasonable time scale to solve both of these problems.
Ok, so this is off topic, but might be interesting to those curious about what's happening at CERN.
Allan Cameron and Ron Howard was at CERN last week. Here is a photo.
Tom Hanks will be here in two weeks to visit the LHC and in the fall, Angels and Deamons will be filmed at CERN... Why the hurry? It has only been two months since the cast has been selected?! Presumably, they want to shoot before the LHC closure sometime in March... ?
They just flooded the engine. Wait about a 1/2 hour before giving the old pull-start a go.
Allow me to clarify: fields do not physically exist. However they are our own mathematical constructions. They may explain nothing of the nature of the force and interactions, but they are actually quite useful to determine magnitudes, directions, etc. Ironically, in another post I mentioned to somebody that "fields are not aether," when Maxwell actually came up with his theory of electromagnetism based off of aether-tubes as the field lines. He later decided to drop the aether-tubes interpretation and to accept purely the mathematics. Harsh of him? Anyway, gravity is not a field, but so far the results of its interactions can be predicted via field theory.
* Warning: gravity is only a theory,
* Open questions in quantum gravity,
* Resources,
* Open questions in physics,
* What's wrong with loop quantum gravity?
(*) 'Might be' is rather strong in this scenario. Virtual photons have not been observed, though acting as if they exist has proven tremendous success in quantum electrodynamics. Yet, we do not know how to make gravitons work as the mediator of gravity in our calculations, so 'might be' is not too far from any truth.
Gravity is most certainly not some field.....Allow me to clarify: fields do not physically exist.
Errr....yes they do. The electric field, by definition, is the force felt per unit charge. If I put a charge in an electric field then can physically observe the force and hence infer that there is a field. Virtual particles are the mechanism that creates the field but the field IS is physical entity. Another simple test that a field is something real is that it has an energy density. If the field does not physically exist then where does all this energy disappear to?
By the same extension gravity is a field too - albeit a rather strange one since as it is a tensor field. In fact as long as you put a cut off in the energy scale you can use quantum field theory to describe gravity just like any other field.