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LHC To Start Back Up In November At Half Power
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."
Good, only half the universe will be destroyed. =)
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.
they've been soldering those wires. They should you thicker ones if they want higher current
I was at BestBuy a few years ago and heard the blue-shirted drone tell these guys "Look, you have to use Monster Cable for your Hadron collider."
Did they listen? No!
.
Trolling is a art,
It always kinda amuses* me to remember that 7 TeV is equal to ~1 microJoule. So this incredibly massive and complicated machine is required just to reach energies that are a million times less than what I can get by flicking my pinky finger. Though they do put all that energy into a single subatomic particle and carefully guide them into hitting each other right in front of their detectors, while every time I try to flick a proton with my finger I end up hitting a ton of them and they go flying off every which way, so I guess we still need the LHC.
* Yes I am easily amused, why do you ask?
The enemies of Democracy are
Now I can't get that song out of my head again. "LHCB sees where the anti-matter's gone. ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions. CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind. They're looking for whatever new particles they can find..."
Argh!
I piss off bigots.
I'll be more impressed when they turn it up to 11.
"LHC To Start Back Up In November At Half Power"
Any bets that it will not?
Vegas should start a pool, I'm sure it would be a hit with the betters.
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.
So I guess you could say that the Large Hadron Collider is being treated for electron dysfunction.
Rob
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour ... you're gonna see some serious shit.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Did they listen? No!
Not true. I heard they tried to buy the proper cable but attempted to pay with $2 bills and were promptly arrested ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There's an excellent video on YouTube of Ed Farhi explaining it in some detail: Why Physicists Need the Large Hadron Collider
Basically, if all they find is the Higgs boson, that will be a huge disappointment. (Unfortunately, that's the expected outcome.)
One electron volt is equal to 1.60217653(14) x 10^19 joules.
And they are talking about 7 and 14 Trillion eV which is a bunch of joules! Pretty nice ;)
You missed by a factor of 10^38
1 eV = 1.6 x 10^MINUS19 Joules
Actually, 1 electron volt is closer to 10^(-19) Joules, so
14 TeV = 2.2 x 10^(-6) J
(When in doubt, ask google! :-))
Well when you find the Higgs, you want to measure its properties and see if you really have a Higgs and not some random new particle. And then if it is the Higgs, you want to see which Higgs it is. All this takes time and lots and lots of data.
And unless we are very unlucky, there should hopefully be lots of other werid and wonderful things to find. I'm personally not interested in the Higgs at all but much more exotic things. But for the media, its easier to say "we are looking for X" rather than we are looking for "X, Y, Z oh and dont forget about B but to be honest, we dont know what happens at these energies and would like to find out"
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.
On the contrary. The Higgs is discoverable at a 5 sigma significance level (PhysRev standard for "discovery") with about 1 year's worth of data at design energy and luminosity.[1] Furthermore, since people have already worked on analyses, it will only take probably about 6 months to run the analyses on the data and get the results approved by the collaboration. So, with the current startup schedule, barring any more problems, we should expect to see a Higgs discovery paper from CMS and ATLAS in time for the Winter 2011-12 conference cycle.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1458
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wait... not that kind of sig.
Supersymmetry is a bigger deal than the Higgs, I would judge. The LHC is expected to find SUSY quite rapidly. Additionally, we will want to measure Higgs properties, perform precision measurements of various things such as the single top cross section, B_s mixing (and CP violation, and maaaaybe CPT violation), the top mass, the W and Z masses, etc. More exotic things include searching for (yes, really) black hole production, large extra dimensions, technicolor (an alternative model to the standard model Higgs mechanism), WIMPs, dark matter, excited states of the W and Z, a fourth fermion generation, glueballs, tetraquarks, pentaquarks, magnetic monopoles, leptoquarks, sterile neutrinos, etc, and other, completely unexpected, new physics.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.