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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"
They were normally going to be closed during the winter?
Or till Earth is destroyed. Whichever comes first...
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Why ask for 1 trillion when we can ask for 1 billion? *raises pinky*
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.
I recall reading about the energy dump they use when they're done with the beam, and how it "fuzzifies" the beam before letting hit the thermal dump.
The beam wouldn't blow a huge crater in the copper, it doesn't have that much power, but it is very tightly focused, so it would drill a small hole 30 meters deep.
The LHC uses a pulsed beam instead of a continuous one, so all the energy in a single pulse of the beam can drill a 30 meter hole though solid copper.
What they ended up doing is running the beam through a "fuzzifier" to make it's cross section larger, and then rapidly scanning it back and forth across a target of some very heat resistant material... either carbon or space shuttle tile type stuff. That way they're not blowing holes in their beam dump.
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.
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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.
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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?
I read some while ago that the LHC was the first particle accelerator powerful enough to basically destroy itself if the beam was dumped directly into the walls.
The energy stored in the entire beam will be around 350MJ, which, if I did the conversion correctly, is equivalent to about 83kg TNT. Of course it won't be able to dump all of it in an instant (at least not in the same location), but I imagine it could still be quite destructive if it fails.
I think I remember the article saying that the hole would be 30 meters in length and have a diameter a little smaller than a pencil. That's not an insubstantial amount of energy, by any means.
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.