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Revived LHC Could Run Through the Winter
Jack Spine writes "When you are powering nuclear particle beams that could drill a hole through 30 metres of copper, you don't want to be paying a premium for electricity. However, Cern scientists are determined that the delayed experiment will get some workable results, and so are preparing to run the machine throughout the winter."
Cern should be CERN, as it stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
Maybe they'll discover the new particle that is the carrier for libedo - the hardon.
They were normally going to be closed during the winter?
Or till Earth is destroyed. Whichever comes first...
I'm a tag
Why ask for 1 trillion when we can ask for 1 billion? *raises pinky*
Well, they aren't a bank.
Do they mean fire some teeny tiny particles 30m into copper, or blow a giant 30m crater in an enormous ingot of copper? Cos it kinda sounds like the second one in the article.
Let's get this show on the road! Then we can start flinging some of those black holes at North Korea!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
I do recall a paper suggesting that the experiment itself will interfere with itself back through time and prevent the machine from ever powering up.
I can't find the paper on Google though, I really need to read it it'll help me figure out why the time machine I'm building doesn't work.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
"It's a Type 13 planet, it's in its final stages, it's infected with some kind of alien - we are going to leave...."
Check it out! Trust me, it's awesome: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Great book. Must get a new copy. Mine died years ago. Atleast in this time line.....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
This may have to do with the fact that Fermilab could find the Higgs particle very soon, and then the LHC would have been scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
Find free books.
Unfortunately in the southern hemisphere the spin is reversed, which could result in the anti-god particle. They'll play with black holes, but there are limits to their hubris.
The next version is the Trans-equator Hadron Collider (THC) which will circle the equator and have a branch that passes through the core in an attempt to discover stuff that's like, really cool, man. Here's a diagram.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This has been discussed previously on Slashdot. British writing often uses only initial-caps for pronounceable acronyms. The BBC is especially aggressive about this, resulting in things like "Nasa", which looks like a foreign name at first glance from an American eye. Why the BBC differentiates "BAFTA" from "NASA" in their style guide is a mystery to me; however, in recent BBC articles, it appears that the BBC is writing "Bafta" in actual practice.
BBC House Style and Writing Guidelines, September 2007 (in PDF or raw HTML):
Is it a slow news day or what?
...in New Zealand. May I ask why they aren't firing up the machine right now?
Help Help, I am being repressed!
... You... You had me at "Nuclear Particle Beams!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
or I'm some sort of jerk destroying the planet.
Let's see how Duke Nukem Forever does first...
A Fermilab discovery would actually be nice, because then it gives us somewhere in particular to look and focus our analyses. Whatever happens, the LHC *will* have the better data eventually.
Not to mention, the LHC can still take a good stab at solving the hierarchy problem by finding new particles at the TeV scale.
The real reason, at least as I see it reasoned by those around me, is to give the graduate students and post-docs a chance to finish their jobs in a *reasonable* timescale and move on. There's people who have been here for 6 years already waiting for startup, which is the average Physics PhD duration as it is. If collisions were delayed again, imagine all those people AND their advisers and bosses screaming to upper management.
I've been trying forever to remember the title of that book.
Sadly, my copy seems to have vanished from my bookshelves as well. (Hmm. This can't be a good sign...)
Cern should be CERN, as it stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
Actually it doesn't. The Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire was a provisional body created in 1952, and no longer exists. In 1954 the European Laboratory for Particle Physics was founded, and the C.E.R.N. was dissolved. The laboratory is named CERN, and although it is conventionally capitalised, it is not an acronym.
The capitalisation of Aids is because it has now become a real word in its own right in common usage. Technically, AIDS is a spectrum of disorders of the immune system of which one is the Aids that is thought of generally as AIDS.
Though this isn't actually much use, since there are Marital Aids which is not the same thing AT ALL.
I've heard...
When you have produced EXABYTES of data, you need time to go through and work out what you have. This can take months. And if you are getting more data during that time
a) You'll never catch up (a la San Fran Bridge paint job)
b) You'll not know what to change to look for next (informed by what you're seeing in the data so far)
so no opportunity cost is lost.
At the moment, though there's not a winter's worth of analysis data volume created. So that would be an opportunity cost and guess what? They're running over the winter, like you said they should.
The black hole, if stable (and it shouldn't be) is TINY. The gravitational force is MINISCULE and therefore the distance at which this force is effective against the nuclear forces keeping the baryonic matter in place is fantastically small. The rate of capture of mass into this microscopic black hole would mean a gain of an atom each thousand trips through the planet or more. And a single trip is made by working out how long it takes the matter to fall 6000km to the centre of the earth (and getting 1g only at the ends of the travel, 0g at the centre). That's hours. So to increase by a single atom weight would take centuries. And to get it to a rate where it's picking up more than one atom per traverse will take ~10^4 times that if you ignore the small increase in probability over that time.
So that would be a billion years just to get it to pick up several nanograms an hour.
But not only does the microscopic black hole have to be stable, it also has to have nearly perfect head-on collision with its partner particle so that there is no kinetic energy left over. It doesn't take much energy to give the miniscule mass of the black hole the 11kps needed to escape earth's gravitational pull and therefore at most have a 1-in-a-thousand chance of picking up anything if it passes through the small section of the possible transits that make it pass through the majority of the earth's volume. There's a 50-50 chance it never passes through earth at all even the once.
The accelerator takes months to warm up and begin the experiments and it needs to cool down after running them. That cool down phase is on winter because the electricity is of much higher price at that time (this is not some village in Minnesota, this is in Switzerland and due to everyone having the heating on in winter, the electricity price is much higher in that period).
If it wasn't like that, we could just let it cool down during Summer and take 3 months of vacations and analyse the results on the beach instead of stopping the all thing in winte and having to take shifts during the summer to keep it running.
So bottom line: Although it is not shut down just because it's winter, it has to be shut down at specific intervals and we shut it down in winter because of much higher electricity costs, otherwise, if it was just a question of preference, we would shut it down in the summer.
You just have to give it the time.
Without a value of time, that statement is useless.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
FTFA:
"This caused an electrical arc, which punctured the cavity containing liquid helium used to supercool both the experiment and the magnets which direct and focus the particle beams."
Yeah... I hate it when that happens.
I was relieved last year when I found they couldnt make a black hole.
With all it's magnets and electricity usage, you can't convince me they are anywhere near efficient enough to NOT generate loads of waste heat. In the winter -- especially during those '22 days', when electricity is at a premium, I suspect it has a good deal to due with those being the shortest and among the coldest days of winter. That means during the time of highest electrical cost, they are also likely to have the coldest outdoor temperatures.
There is a high amount of power going into the facility. The magnets can't take much power after they are energized, given they are being held at super-cool temperatures and are designed to function as 100% efficient super-conducting magnets -- then all of the power must be going into ... what? Varying the magnetic flux to accelerate the particles (which will generate heat), and running cooling compressors (which could have been designed to take advantage of cooler outdoor temperatures to decrease cooling load requirements, but I suspect not) takes some power but would generate heat as a by-product.
Then there are the beams -- very high energy cost beams that are colliding with each other. Except for parts of the beams which convert into matter, which sounds negligible, with most of the research going into analyzing the decay products of temporarily created particles, then all that energy must generate ALOT of heat. In the coldest months of winter, not only should they be able to use that waste heat to heat the non-refrigerated, human-inhabited parts of the facility, (reducing heating load), most importantly -- that waste heat combined with the outdoor temperatures that are among the lowest of the winter, should provide ideal conditions for electrical generation through Sterling engines. It seems that the colder it is outside, the better the conditions for turning their waste heat into [re]usable electricity via Sterling
Combined with the possibility of increased cooling operating efficiency in winter (less cooling requirements, if they designed their cooling system s to take advantage of lower outdoor temperatures to start from as a base for cold-air to refrigerate, or help to bring in cold-outdoor air to help insulate cold-areas, their winder electrical load could drop by some fraction, reducing electrical usage during peak-cold times, thus further dropping their electrical load and lowering their winter electric bill.
While the majority of power goes energizing the magnets, they should be very efficient, as the operate at absolute zero are are near 100% efficiency). However , the 'end' work is 'smashing' of particles together and watching decay patterns. Unless I am gravely mistaken, virtually none, or a nearly insignificant percentage of that collision results in the creation of matter (that would act as a very large energy sump).
Given those conditions, it is likely that about 95% or more of the energy used would be radiated out (after decay) as VERY hot "waste heat" -- with each beam having the excess heat to be able to drill 30cm holes in copper (that's alot of excess heat!!!).
Such high heat with the extra frigid temperatures outside should enable optimal power generation from numerous heat-differential engines that convert heat-differences into mechanical energy.
Peltier devices have potential for high efficiency as they skip a mechanical -> generator step) (Peltier Guide.
Mechanical devices such as those describe by the original (free-public domain), patented Stirling engine, US Patent 3995429, (a href="http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6804171/claims.html">US Patent 6804171, (OR), possibly, low-cost, licensable patents Method Accession# 01A0878780),