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LHC Fully Documented Online
Physicser writes "Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors? The whole shebang — seven reports totaling 1600 pages, 115 MB, with contributions from 8000 scientists and engineers — has been published electronically by the Journal of Instrumentation, free to read without a subscription."
well, they have the abstracts... you don't have to download the whole thing... but having read one abstract, i'm lost in the technical jargon, that large particle collider scientists write about without hesitation.
"Abstract. The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC. To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5. Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I am very much looking forward to what comes out of the LHC. It's been wonderful to watch its construction and that's only a fraction of the satisfaction its discoveries will provide.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Come on, don't you remember the slashdot article about it?
Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground
Designed with mind to send protons around
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance
Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride
Til in the hearts of the detectors, theyre made to collide
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room
Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum
And then
LHCb sees where the antimatters gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
Theyre looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
Come on, let's drop some particle physics in the club!
Rock Us, Dukakis.
I understand every word. Any experimental particle physicist does. I will conceed its not clearn to non-experts.
However an important feature of a luminosity and diffractive phyics detector such as TOTEM is its coverage, ie at what angle it can go to. Therefor its pseudorapidy range (basically the angle it covers from the beam line) and the distances of the roman pots from CMS (and effecting the angular coverage of this part of the detector) are key peices of information. This is perhaps the most important thing to know about TOTEM.
Isn't it funny that the entire LHC spec is 1.600 pages, while the OOXML documentation, as submitted by Microsoft, is a full 6.000 pages.
Does this reflect a difference in complexity, or is it a sign of something else?
As in "you couldn't hit a barn with that thing"?
Is this physicist humour?