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One of the Coolest Places In the Universe
phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."
We built the LHC to look for tits?
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Tongue contact with cold collider parts can result in serious injury.
-- thinkyhead software and media
The LHC has nothing on my mom's basement. RIGHT HERE is where it's at, baby. Cool Central.
LHC Countdown
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
Assuming that the LHC will destroy the Earth, this countdown is also the number of days left to lose your virginity.
Indeed, getting 1.9K in a lab, or in a single NMR magnet is not a big deal. Try to do it with 1232 huge magnets, spread around 26.6 km, being some 100m underground, and using 7600 km of super-conducting "cable" (270 000 km of superconducting "strand"). This is roughly 4700 tons of material to keep at 1.9K, and 120 tons of helium being recirculated all the time through these stuff to assure 150 kW of HEAT power is dissipated. Noone ever has done a similar cryogenic installation at such scale before!
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks?
[TheXPhial] vaccuums
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
[TheXPhial] black holes
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
[TheXPhial] lava?
http://www.object404.com
HTC technology is not available yet for applications like this. They are using conventional Sn3Ti (and NbTi to some extent) superconductors. I'm not sure how the Wikipedia quote is relevant here. Although the wires in LHC are made of LTS materials, the materials still are type II superconductors. The main reason to have large cooling capacity is a phenomenon called "quenching". The wires in the coils are actually made of really thin filaments of superconducting material inside a copper matrix. These filaments can (and do) go out of superconducting state because of a local problem, and at this small point there's naturally high ohmic heating. If the system can't respond quickly enough to lower the local temperature so that the superconducting state is restored, this point of normal state will start to spread at a high speed, causing more heating and boiling off the coolant quite expensively. So this is the reason why you need large cooling capacity and thermal conductivity.
U+F8FF
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
Paradise. Why, when I was growin' up, we were all huddled together inside a higgs boson in the middle of a black hole. Every morning, we'd lick the black hole clean with our tongues, then huddle around the event horizon rubbing our hands together until it went *above* absolute zero.
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