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LHC To Start Back Up In November At Half Power

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the no-blackholes-here dept.

mcgrew writes to mention that the Large Hadron Collider, smasher of particles, will get another chance to prove itself this November. The restart will begin with tests at half power, a mere 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), and ramp up slowly to the designed goal of 14 TeV. "Measurements indicate that some of the electrical connections could not safely handle the amount of current needed to run at the full 14 TeV, so will need to be replaced before dialing up the energy that far. But even 7 TeV is much higher than physicists have ever probed in the laboratory before. The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is the current record holder, with collisions at 2 TeV."

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Temporary! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Informative

    One thing missing from the summary is that 3.5 TeV/beam is only (hoïpefully) a very temporary setup. The ramp up to 5TeV/beam, or 10 TeV centre of mass energy should be quick rapid if everything works. Going to the full 7 TeV will take longer though.

  2. Re:Only half by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Meh. You have to wait for someone to manually update that page. You'd be better off checking the status yourself with the internal and external webcams.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. The actual plan by andre.david · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi,

    We were just briefed at CERN of the plan. It is a plan. Plans can change. With that proviso:

    0 - get the beams circulating at injection energy (from last year's experience, this happened in one week)

    1 - take some collision data at injection energy (450 GeV/c per beam => 900 GeV at center-of-mass or half the Tevatron) (from last year's experience, this could be only another week)

    2 - CERN will observe the annual closure from Dec 19 to Jan 3.

    3 - ramp the energy up to 3.5 TeV/c per beam (7 TeV center-of-mass energy, 3.6x more than the Tevatron)

    4 - take enough data to be competitive with 20 years of Tevatron in some topics

    5 - ramps the energy to 5 TeV/c per beam (10 TeV center-of-mass energy, 5 times more than the Tevatron)

    6 - inject lead-ions and have some Pb+Pb collisions at around 2.75 TeV center-of-mass energy? (that would be 13 times more energy than Brookhaven's RHIC Au+Au)

    7 - shutdown and work on getting the machine ready for 7 TeV/c per beam

    Thank you for your attention.