LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts

The LHC has become the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, weighing in at over one trillion electron volts. "Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts. On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this 'pilot beam,' reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT. The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001. The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts."

Comments

WOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

With One Trillion Election Votes, he's a shoe in!

Re:WOW!

[cheftw]

Some mod woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I found parent to be mildly funny and ontopic.

On a related note, does anyone else feel it should be pronounced electrovolt?
IAAP and I understand that that's not what it is, but it sounds far cooler, and isn't that what the LHC is all about?

When will the science begin

[furby076]

The article asks this question fairly often and this is important. While testing is key and we need to make sure the systems are working properly (and will hopefully not break) the team at LHC needs to step it up a notch. Waiting this long to get to this test, and waiting another year to get to the 7.5TEVL and none of these are to do science. It's very disappointing to the science community (who at least understand the reasoning) but extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

A first-poster who read the article? I want to subscribe to your exercise regime.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure it has provided plenty of research... into how to design and build a new generation of particle accelerators.

The science has begun!
Just, not the same science as what the project is to eventually accomplish...

Re:When will the science begin

[Beelzebud]

Science isn't about instant gratification.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

no but when this kind of energy is being required and the amount of money that has been pumped into it is being reported while economies round the world are crashing, joe public do start to ask questions (quite rightly). It is disappointing whatever you may think and I agree with GP post.

Re:When will the science begin

[DerekLyons]

It's very disappointing to the science community (who at least understand the reasoning) but extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research.

In other words, the scientific community actually doesn't "understand the reasoning" and is as ignorant as the general public.

Re:When will the science begin

[Kelson]

I don't see anything in the article that says they'll be waiting another year to test it at higher energies. I do see that they expect to do physics with it "next year" -- i.e. in the calendar year 2010, which is only a month away.

Re:When will the science begin

[jgtg32a]

It isn't, since when?

Or are you talking about theory?

Re:When will the science begin

[Farmer Tim]

Science isn't about instant gratification.

Not a sperm donor, I take it.

Re:When will the science begin

[furby076]

I agree, science is not about instant gratification but science has to start at some point. LHC project started before:2004 (this was a date i found where parts were shipped, had a hard time finding an actual start date). LHC project was finished the build, and went live: Sept 2008 (first live fire). The LHC project has not started a scientific study as of November 2009. So how much patience do we need to start experimentation, let alone completing it, publishing the raw findings, analyzing the raw findings, and the coming out with some results?

To AC about my first post and reading it - the regime is 3 raw eggs daily, 2 hours of gym daily, 1 hour of sex daily, and reading the article hours before it was posted to /. and coincidentally going to /. just as the article posted :)

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll?

It was only switched on again a week ago, and you want it to be spewing out Higgs' already?!!?

These machines are *stunningly* complex, and always take years to reach their full potential. Google for the luminosity history of any major machine (LEP, Tevatron, etc.) to see how long they took to reach their design goals.

Trust me, as a particle physicist (posting anonymously to preserve moderations), this week has been amazingly exciting, and everyone I know is stunned by how fast this machine is coming back on.

"step it up a notch" -- you *must* be a troll.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

A first-poster who read the article? I want to subscribe to your exercise regime.

Hear, Hear!

Re:When will the science begin

[furby076]

@Kelson: FTA: "Officials say it is another milestone in the LHC's drive towards its main scientific tests set for 2010."

With 2010 being a month away, history has proven that if they were starting the project in a month they would have said so (it would be more exciting). Similar to condominium realtors who say "Gorgeous condos selling from the $200s"...and when you walk in it is in the 200,000 range....starting at $295,000. Plus the article says "Drive" which is another word for "aim" or for "goal" or better yet, "we are hoping"

@AC poster who claims to be a physicist...Nope not a troll. Just a person who takes ambiguity as an attempt to conceal something. But no matter how much you say "troll" at my original post, it just won't make it so.

Re:When will the science begin

[jeffmeden]

When does the Science ever begin with a particle accelerator project? What do you define as science? They are now crashing particles faster than the Tevatron (as is the subject of the article) and have taken the title of "most powerful particle accelerator". Will this yield results different from what the Tevatron has seen for the past few years? We won't know until it happens. Will the LHC quickly ramp up to 7 TeV? We won't know until it happens. Will anything come of the data produced when it runs at 7 TeV? Again, we won't know until it happens. Considering how much time and money has been spent we should expect the odds are really good that some unique science will come of it some day, but to say that a decade long project is going too slowly because full power won't be reached for another year seems a little short sighted.

Re:When will the science begin

[znu]

Said amount of money being a little less than 1% of what the United States alone spent on its stimulus bill. And the project employs several thousand people.

Re:When will the science begin

[StikyPad]

That's self gratification, not instant gratification. Although I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that last part...

Re:When will the science begin

[Smooth and Shiny]

So masturbation is a science now? How... interesting.

Re:When will the science begin

[flabordec]

From this article:

The unexciting news is that we are all still here, and (barring a meteor strike) we will still be here when the LHC reaches 7.5TeV very late next year.

So it seems they are waiting for late next year.

Re:When will the science begin

[physburn]

Its a slow ramp up of energies. The LHC has already been doing a few collisions at 450 GeV, here see here, but since the injection energy to the ring 450 GeV, the LHC wasn't doing any acceleration at all there. The 1 TeV milestone show the LHC is in good working order, and the'll be increasing the energy in steps, the few 14 TeV might not be until 2011, it will run at 10 TeV instead for most of 2010 barring any more mishaps and do good physics. CERN have said the'll need to retrofit new quenching mechanisms (safety features for if the superconducting magnets get to hot and cease to superconduct), before they can run at the few 14 TeV. Although it might seem like a shame not to be running at full energy, the Higgs particles are expectable to be of mass 120-190 GeV, what CERN needs to find the Higgs is not high energy but high luminosity, large statistics on a lot of collisions. So the lower energy isn't going to stop the Higgs boson discovery. Supersymmetric particles could have any mass or not exist at all, but the losing the 10-14 TeV range, won't make much difference to begin with.

---

LHC Feed @ Feed Distiller

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

So how much patience do we need to start experimentation, let alone completing it, publishing the raw findings, analyzing the raw findings, and the coming out with some results?

About 5 - 10 more years. Like I said in my other post, look up the history of any other collider of similar size, and see how long they took to get reasonable luminosity.

Expecting science this early is a little unreasonable.

Re:When will the science begin

[gtall]

Yeah, yer right, what would go wrong with seven trillion electron volts. They should just turn it on already and hide behind the next mountain range. If it doesn't blow its bits, experiments out the whazoo!!

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

To AC about my first post and reading it - the regime is 3 raw eggs daily, 2 hours of gym daily, 1 hour of sex daily,

I recall a wise person once saying that anyone who talks about sex a lot either isn't having it, or isn't very good at it.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC poster who claims to be a physicist...Nope not a troll. Just a person who takes ambiguity as an attempt to conceal something. But no matter how much you say "troll" at my original post, it just won't make it so.

OK, so you're not trolling, but you *are* very naive in your estimation of how long it should take to get this machine running. Amongst experts (and I am one of those experts) the only surprise is that it is coming on so *quickly*!

But don't take my word for it -- go find a particle physicist or accelerator physicist and ask them.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit. LHC is already operating at higher energies than any other accelerator in existence, hence it is already doing new physics. You are confusing the beginning of the search for new physics (at 1.18 TeV, which the LHC has already achieved) with the end of the search for new physics (at 7 TeV, which it will achieve past the end of 2010). It is entirely possible that something new is found within the next year.

Re:When will the science begin

[Luyseyal]

So how much patience do we need to start experimentation, let alone completing it, publishing the raw findings, analyzing the raw findings, and the coming out with some results?

Not to mention dropping us some more results on the LHC @ Home grid. World Community Grid has been rather lonely for some time...

-l

Re:When will the science begin

[furby076]

So 5-10 more years just to START the tests? Why don't they just say that instead of saying within the next year? Either you are wrong or they are lying.

Re:When will the science begin

[CecilPL]

Well, all money ever does is employ people. That's what money is - a way to get other people to give you the product of their labors.

Re:When will the science begin

[ByOhTek]

It's possible he or she read it from the Firehose long before it was posted.

Or became a subscriber. Take your pick.

Re:When will the science begin

[pierreact]

2012! Of course! Mayas already told about it!

Re:When will the science begin

[Chris Burke]

Or they were replying to your comment at large, indicating either starting, finishing, or publishing the work. In any case, they were talking about historical trends in colliders, while the statement about the LHC is specific to the plans for the LHC. So "Either you are wrong or they are lying" is not a necessary implication (both statements can in fact be true), not to mention a hasty leap to conclusions.

You say you agree that science is not about instant gratification, but you sure don't seem to understand what it is that you're agreeing with.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just the OP is ignorant and should not be speaking on behalf of the scientific community.

Re:When will the science begin

[smooth wombat]

Your comment reminds me of the scene from Oceans 11 where they going to produce an EMP, or something similar, and the guy is standing away from the van containing the device. As he raises his hand to push the shiny red button, he moves his free hand to cover his nether region.

The look on his face as he scrunches when he presses the button is hilarious.

Re:When will the science begin

[mhajicek]

I dunno, should we rush the biggest, most complex project ever undertaken by the human race? If you don't have the time and resources to do it right, how will you have the time and resources to do it over?

Re:When will the science begin

[boristhespider]

haha, are you suggesting that europe pumps over 14bn euro into a machine and then because some people are slightly impatient, they should whack it up to 11 to see what happens?

"hey, we've not done any tests yet, why are you ramping it up to 7Tev?"

"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient."

"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient!? what are we waiting for??"

*disturbing explosion from underground*

"oh. shit."

science will start in january/february. to be honest, what they're finishing up now is calibrating the detectors which is pretty vital -- and even so they've run beams with more energy than any accelerator ever has before. or do you plan to somehow puzzle out the observations by the power of voodoo?

Re:When will the science begin

[boristhespider]

Oh but if he did that he'd lose his chance to talk uninformed shit on Slashdot about how they should screw testing and calibration and ramp the LHC up to full immediately!

Re:When will the science begin

[lennier]

"When does the Science ever begin with a particle accelerator project? "

The same time it always does: When the lead physicist steps into the acceleration chamber... and vanishes.

Oh boy.

Re:When will the science begin

[b4upoo]

Will that machine cook turkeys quickly?

Re:When will the science begin

[sifur]

Except when you hoard it.

Re:When will the science begin

[Arthur Grumbine]

I do see that they expect to do physics with it ...

They better make sure to wear appropriate shirts, then.

Re:When will the science begin

[Maury Markowitz]

> but extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something
> so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research. ... and never will. Seriously, do you think anyone in "the rest of the world" gives a hoot whether the Higgs is 22 GeV or 26 GeV?

As I said elsewhere, Higgs is the football of the physics world - its the big game so we convince ourselves its worth watching and stand around cheering while the game is on, although we all know the outcome is completely unimportant.

Maury

Re:When will the science begin

[Farmer Tim]

When you're on your own there's no sense taking all day about it.

Re:When will the science begin

[Farmer Tim]

Have you seen inside an "adult shop" recently? Looks that way.

Besides, whatever it takes to get teenagers into science is fine with me.

Re:When will the science begin

[ceoyoyo]

One can be disappointed that the world is the way it is while still understanding that it is so and realizing that it could not be otherwise.

I'm disappointed that I don't have my own private jet but I understand why that is and furthermore I continue to support the decisions I've made that result in my not having a private jet.

Re:When will the science begin

[DaleSwanson]

no but when this kind of energy is being required

7 Trillion electron volts = 1.1215 micro joules. According to Wikipedia that's equivalent to the kinetic energy of 7 flying mosquitoes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)#10-6

Re:When will the science begin

[Chris Burke]

The same time it always does: When the lead physicist steps into the acceleration chamber... and vanishes.

There's a time lock on the door. It's... it's a safety feature...

Re:When will the science begin

[19thNervousBreakdown]

I'm too lazy, but somebody do a relative size comparison now.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, science is not about instant gratification but science has to start at some point.

You know the World Wide Web that you're using now, you stupid fuck? It exists because the LHC designers needed a way to share documents.

Get out of my gene pool, and off my planet.

Re:When will the science begin

[chromas]

or do you plan to somehow puzzle out the observations by the power of voodoo?

Duh!

Re:When will the science begin

[budgenator]

Unless you keep your savings in your mattress, it's still being invested in economic activity.

Re:When will the science begin

[steelfood]

Depends on the proximity of the donee.

Re:When will the science begin

[budgenator]

It has been doing "science" for quite a while now, my BOINC client crunched some LHC data long ago, the detectors run just fine off natural cosmic rays collisions. Even at partial energies they could find things they are looking for because HE physics is a probabilistic endeavor, it's just more likely for the events to occur at higher average energies and luminosities.

Re:When will the science begin

[smoker2]

Fuck the mods. If you're doing it right they should all be positive anyway, and I think it's more important to refute the trolls than it is to glad-hand the acolytes. Maybe you can convert somebody ... ?

Meanwhile, I agree, it's about time we got some results from this, if only to shut those assholes up. [neat - firefox just suggested "assholes" while I was typing !]

Re:When will the science begin

[Mr. Freeman]

Just what exactly do you think the LHC people have been doing these last several years? The rest of the world that can't fathom why the LHC is taking so long also believes that this thing will create black holes that will destroy the world. These people are called idiots and their opinion matters not because they haven't bothered to do any research other than watching what nonsense the media is talking about it. (90% of the media is: "The LHC will smash atoms at fast speeds.... or something")

Building something this big is amazingly complicated and requires a lot of time. Considering the amazing complexity of this device, it's quite spectacular that it's happened this quickly. Traffic projects consisting of a paved, flat surface often get delayed longer than the LHC with has a fuckload of amazingly complicated scientific instruments in it.

Re:When will the science begin

[emilper]

Amongst experts (and I am one of those experts) the only surprise is that it is coming on so *quickly*!

they should have hired some engineers to build it, then ...

Re:When will the science begin

[jhoegl]

Im pretty sure they had a very large malfunction. I think they said it would be a year to fix it. Looks like it took less.

Re:When will the science begin

[jhoegl]

The taller you are, the tougher it is.... relatively.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, that's the energy of a single proton in the LHC. You need to multiply by 322,920,000,000,000 to get the total energy per beam.

Re:When will the science begin

[zevans]

As I said elsewhere, Higgs is the football of the physics world - its the big game so we convince ourselves its worth watching and stand around cheering while the game is on, although we all know the outcome is completely unimportant.

Maybe so, but that does not detract from the scientific value of the LHC.
The media may be obsessed with the Higgs; the CERN projects, fortunately, are not, and have been doing real science relying on the passing kindness of cosmic rays during the downtime.
The LHC is the next step in particle physics and to a large extent materials science in general; anyone here who doesn't think that's important had better switch off their PC, the LCD display, and the CD they are listening to and go back to your cave.

Re:When will the science begin

[XSpud]

According to Wikipedia that's equivalent to the kinetic energy of 7 flying mosquitoes.

In the UK we've gone over to the metric system - how many wasps is this?

Re:When will the science begin

[rolando2424]

(...)extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research.

There a Duke Nukem Forever joke in there somewhere...

Re:When will the science begin

[slashdotwannabe]

Please convert to LoCs. Any number not refactorable to LoCs is not worth mentioning on /..

Re:When will the science begin

[Arancaytar]

Yes, but this energy is concentrated in a single particle. It's a lot more on that scale...

Re:When will the science begin

[Arancaytar]

It's been broken for over a year, being repaired.

Re:When will the science begin

[Arancaytar]

The BOINC project is pure simulation. No actual LHC data has ever been processed by community grids, nor will it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC@Home

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried that, the slashcode somehow knew and erased all of my mods.

Re:When will the science begin

[Xest]

According to yesterday's BBC article on it, early 2010.

Re:When will the science begin

[aphexcoil2]

"It was only switched on again a week ago, and you want it to be spewing out Higgs' already?!!?" Black holes would be good, too. Naked singularities -- even better! It's like the most expensive Fisher Price "Build your own little universe in a bottle or destroy yours trying" toy.

Re:When will the science begin

[Xest]

Yep, I'm not a physicist and I'm still amazed at how rapidly they're getting this thing going again, it's really quite impressive in itself.

Re:When will the science begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I do see that they expect to do physics with it ...

They better make sure to wear appropriate shirts, then.

to showcase their brilliance by using an overused catchphrase that's not very intelligent?

Re:When will the science begin

[Idiomatick]

Pffft engineering isn't science.

Re:When will the science begin

[Hurricane78]

And that’s the nice thing about paper money: When they use it to pay, it’s worth shit. When you use it to pay, it’s worth a buttload. So you get work for free.

What do you think why the dollar fell into such a deep hole in the years before the whole “bailout” shit??
That was one of the real points of the Iraq/Afghan war. Pff. As if anyone of those rich asses would have cared a bit about 3000-4000 dead people. Not to belittle that it was very bad. Bud just a week later, ten thousands died in India. Did anyone even remember??
See...

Greenhouse Gases

[Atomm]

seven trillion electron volts....

How does that equate to greenhouse gas submissions? And how can the EU hold the Global Warming Conference on one hand, and then generate this kind of power on the other?

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[el3mentary]

7 000 000 000 000 electron volts = 1.12152352 × 10E-6 joules

The beam itself isn't too bad, most of the energy costs are for cooling etc. for the electromagnets

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Jawn98685]

Know much about electricity and it's units of measure?
We didn't think so, so it's a silly question to even ask if you have any grasp at all of physics and the potential that this research holds.

Now, go troll somewhere else. Fox News would be a good start.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Anonymous Coward]

A teraelectronvolt is about one ten-millionth of a joule, and a joule is about equivalent to a fart, energy-wise. I don't know what it costs to bring this beam up to a teraelectronvolt and contain it but it's not like it's a continuous nuclear explosion or something. I believe the precision is more important than the energy cost.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[tist]

A proton (or other particle) at full speed in the LHC: 7 trillion electron Volts 7.0 * 10 ^9 eV. A 100 watt light bulb burning for one hour: 2.2 * 10 ^24 eV So the light bulb represents 3.1* 10 ^14 (that’s 310,000,000,000,000) times the energy of the particle accelerated in the LHC. 7 trillion eV is really, really small.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[DreamsAreOkToo]

Later, Atomm was seen driving off in his SUV, looking smug that he had put those damned scientists in their place.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[srussia]

7 trillion eV is really, really small.

That's actually eV/particle, so total energy depends on the number of particles at that energy.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Eudial]

You've got to keep in mind that this is the energy PER PARTICLE. For reference, 1 gram of matter has something like 10^23 nucleons.

In particle physics, a trillion electron volts is absolutely HUMONGOUS. It is 500 times the energy you get from neutron-antineutron annihilation.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[wowbagger]

I'll give you more of the benefit of the doubt than the moderators, and assume you don't truly know the difference between particle accelerator energies and normal energies.

When somebody says "this particle accelerator takes particles to 1TeV", that means the kinetic energy of each particle is equivalent to the energy a single electron would get if you let it move between the terminals of a 1 trillion volt battery. Now, in one second a current of one amp carries 6.241 509 629 152 65 × 10^18 electrons, so 1 TeV is equal to about 1/ 6.241 509 629 152 65 × 10^8) (less than one sixth of one hundredth of one millionth) of the energy your typical light bulb burns in one second.

True, there are lots of particles in the stream at LHC, but they still are in the billions, not the billions of billions of billions it would take to add up to significant amounts of energy on the global warming scale.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[ceoyoyo]

Don't forget to multiply by the number of particles in the beams.

Or, conversely, divide that lightbulb output by the number of photons it's spewing out.

For comparison, a typical (visible) photon spit out by a light bulb has an energy of about two and a half eV.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[smoker2]

Right, now explain how small an electron volt is....

Let's put it this way, you can grab an electric fence designed for cattle and get more of a shock. I don't care who says it's "per particle". It's still less than an electric fence. Let's measure it in Joules and see how much energy we're talking about. I'm not going to do it because I'll be a troll if I do.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[smoker2]

So a lot less than the number of eV ... It's not powerful on our scale. Only if you focus it on the scale of a proton.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[ceoyoyo]

"You can grab an electric fence designed for cattle and get more of a shock [due to several quintillion electrons travelling through your body]."

I don't get it. Are you somehow under the impression that there is a single particle (or one in each direction) circulating in the LHC with an energy of 1 TeV (or thereabouts)? Or perhaps you think that the the total energy of the LHC beam is 1 TeV?

Neither of these is true. Each particle in this beam has an energy of 1 TeV and there are lots of particles. To go back to the light bulb comparison, the LHC is quite a lot brighter than a lightbulb (in terms of particles per second) and each one of the particles in it's beam is a hell of a lot more energetic than the photons spewed out by that lightbulb.

Let's take a look at your electric fence. The maximum output of an electric fence is apparently limited to 5 Joules.

Compare to the LHC. According to this CERN page, at full power each beam has a total energy of about 362 MJ, and there are two of them. Some illustrative comparisons from the same page:

1) The kinetic energy of a British aircraft carrier going 11.7 knots (or an American supercarrier going 5.6 knots (*2 for both beams)

2) A Subaru + driver going 1712 km/h (*2 for both beams)

3) Both beams together can melt almost one tonne of copper

4) A high speed train going 150 km/h (* 2 for both beams)

5) 77.4 kg of TNT (*2)

So yeah, quite a bit of energy. I'd much rather take the little tingle from an electric fence as opposed to standing in front of a train going 150 km/h or a car going mach 2.

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... you can miss one really big factor (number of particles in the beam, which CERN states it at 2808 * 1.15 * 1e11) and say the total amount of energy must be less than what you get from an electric fence.

You are really good with numbers. Do you happen to be working in the financial industry?

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Anonymous Coward]

(* 2 for both beams)

Note: this in the rest frame of the lab instruments surrounding the collision.

If you really wanna bend your noodle, work out the apparent kinetic energy of the other beam from the perspective of a particle in the one beam that is using coordinates such that it is at rest and experiencing negligible acceleration. (It's easier if you pretend they do not experience electromagnetism -- it's too bad we don't have practical(!) neutron accelerators that can reach TeV/c^2 particle energies).

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[Atomm]

Thank you for clarifying this. I am not an Electrical Engineer and I do not play one on TV either.

It actually was a serious question.

It appears this is talking about the particle beam.

Someone pointed out the cost to cool the magnets. How would that impact energy usage?

Re:Greenhouse Gases

[zevans]

Someone pointed out the cost to cool the magnets. How would that impact energy usage?

It's a strange situation. Once the current is circulating in the superconductor, there will be zero resistance which brings down power consumption massively. Normally you spend most of your electricity just passively heating the cable that's carrying the current.

Unfortunately, you have to use an awful lot of power to keep the superconductors cool in order to obtain the superconduction in the first place.

That said, I think most of the reason for using superconductors at CERN is because of the bigger currents you can carry that way, thus, stronger electromagnets - not because of the energy consumption considerations. In other words, superconducting electros are the only way you can build a strong enough field to steer and accelerate the beam at such high energies. The efficiency of the electromagnets once cold is just a bonus.

Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they know how to conduct themselves this time around.

Re:Shocking

[davester666]

No. Now it's time for them to amp things up!

Re:Shocking

[treeves]

...and keep their cool!

Re:Shocking

[Tibor the Hun]

now you're fucking with their bread and butter.

Re:Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Watt an awful pun-thread this has become.

Re:Shocking

[selven]

Mod parent up, that one was a joule.

Re:Shocking

[cwry]

Watt's so funny?

Re:Shocking

[nacturation]

I don't have the capacity to resist posting...

Re:Shocking

[aphexcoil2]

They need to stop resisting. Remember that Mary goes willingly.

but where

[Anonymous Coward]

but where is the Muslim outrage?

Re:but where

[geckipede]

Religions don't object to research into the unknown because faith gives confidence that the answers are either already known or theologically irrelevant.

Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.

Re:but where

[bkpark]

Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.

Citation needed?

Where they have already been proven wrong, religions often have modified their dogma to be consistent with the latest scientific findings.

It may surprise you to learn this, but the Catholic church (and a lot of protestant churches), for example, has no problem with the theory of evolution. They have already integrated it into their teaching about how evolution is the mechanism God used to create us. The hardcore people who deny every aspect of evolution, including microevolution, are a very small minority even among the pious.

And of course, given how conveniently it fits into church doctrine, the Catholic church was one of the first to accept the Big Bang theory, for whatever that may be worth.

Re:but where

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that you're trolling, but for the record it's here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/6692584/Switzerland-faces-backlash-over-minaret-ban.html

CERN's not at the top of the average Swiss Muslim's "things to worry about" list right now.

Re:but where

[Anonymous Coward]

faggot mormons in Utah depleted the world quota for outrage already

Re:but where

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

Re:but where

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Because I seem to remember that the first people doing what we would call science were monks who believed that a rational God would create a rational universe that could be understood by humans, and then sought to investigate it...

But I guess nobody studies that part of history. They usually skip over that part.

Re:but where

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Religions object when science moves to the realm of meta-physics and tries to answer why instead of how.

Re:but where

[geckipede]

I didn't say every religion did it, however if you do want an example of the catholic church going against scientific findings, try the arguments over efficacy of condoms.

Re:but where

[bkpark]

I didn't say every religion did it, however if you do want an example of the catholic church going against scientific findings, try the arguments over efficacy of condoms.

I don't think this example works. It's not that Catholic church doesn't believe that condoms work (either in terms of preventing STDs or babies, at least some 90+ percent of the time). It's that Catholic church believes use of contraceptives like condoms is morally wrong—science is silent in the matters of morality, at least generally speaking.

You can very well argue that church's position is not morally correct (at least to the extent that church's position on condoms may have helped spread STDs), but to say that they have the science wrong is, well, incorrect?

Re:but where

[budgenator]

To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos.
ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO MEMBERS OF THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR PLENARY ASSEMBLY

Clementine Hall
Friday, 31 October 2008

there you go

Re:but where

[tolkienfan]

Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Hypatia... I don't think any of them claimed to know why.

Re:but where

[HornWumpus]

You should read up on the efficacy claims for condoms made by the Catholic church.

Taking the annual failure rate, using it as a single use failure rate, then using that to guess at an annual rate is just the beginning of their lies (yes lies).

The only saving grace is _nobody_ believes them (or even listens to them).

I'd sooner take relationship advice from /. or 4chan!

IIRC you can find a thick vein of Catholic/condom related BS by searching for 'AIDS virus condom pore size'. I'm too lazy to verify my memory.

No collisions yet, right?

[Gopal.V]

Are these with collisions or merely accelerated beams in a loop? IIRC, the Tevatron did 2x0.98 TeV collisions. Which would be, well ... a bigger bang :)

But the flip side is that we've built the most powerful ray gun ever, now we just need to wait till the aliens attack.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[kabloom]

Even at 7 TeV, it's still only 2.68050555 × 10-7 calories, so it's not even powerful enough as a ray gun to boil water, let alone burn the skin of those superpowered aliens.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[marcansoft]

This is 1.18TeV each way, so if they start colliding the total energy will be 2x1.18 TeV.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Game_Ender]

That's not true at all. When the LHC broke down the first time it caused a decent amount of damage, boring a deep whole into the surrounding concrete. Also the normal beam can bore a hole through 40 meters of solid copper, and it require a very special grouping of materials to stop used up beams.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[vondo]

There have been collisions at 450 on 450. This week, presumably, there will be a day or so of collisions at 1200 on 1200. Progress is being made very quickly now, but they are still proceeding cautiously.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[John Hasler]

The damage in the breakdown was all caused by the energy stored in the magnets that failed and by the pressure of the vaporizing helium.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[jeffmeden]

Each particle has 7 TeV (or it will when the LHC is at full power). Considering there may be a million or more particles in the beam at any given time, the energy is actually quite immense. Of course, the issue of aiming it still comes into play, as I imagine picking up a 27 KM ring and pointing it at invading aliens would be mildly unrealistic.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true at all. When the LHC broke down the first time it caused a decent amount of damage, boring a deep whole into the surrounding concrete.

When the LHC broke down last year, there was not even beam in the machine at that moment. The damage was caused by the energy stored in the magnets evaporating helium, which caused a kind of explosion. It also did not bore holes into the surrounding concrete, but the support structure for some of the magnets was ripped out of the concrete floor.

Nevertheless, you are right in that the energy stored in the beam is quite substantial. What the previous poster was thinking of was the fact that the energy per particle is rather low, by standards of our macroscopic world. It's a bout the energy of a fly, per proton, so a collision has the energy of two flies bumping into each other. The trick is that all that happens on a tiny space, so the energy density is huge.

For the particle beam as a whole, one has to take into account that the beam consists of lots of particles. So the total energy stored in the beam is again quite substantial, also by macroscopic standards.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[vondo]

Correct, and there was no beam in the machine when the breakdown occurred. They were just running current in the magnets. So there was no hole bored through anything. However, there will be a large amount of energy stored in the beams when the accelerator reaches design energy and luminosity.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Kavli]

Well. The beam dumps has to absorb the equivalent of 87kg TNT when they abort a beam. (I don't know the equivalent in Libraries of Congress) You wouldn't live long if you happened to stand in front of it.

  -- K

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[someone1234]

Nah, we just need to divert some energy into the beam deflector field.
I mean, you don't have to move the accelerator ring, just manipulate the beam at the exit point.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Collisions are occurring as of 25 mins ago (10pm CERN time). Tis exciting.

but look at me still talking
when there's Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me glad I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
With the detectors that are still alive!

ps
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
CERN Particle physics
We do what we must
because we can.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

No collisions but one near miss. Luckily it was just a muffin this time.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, it's not powerful enough to boil water with a single particle.

Put enough of those single particles together and you've got a pretty nice ray gun though.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[caluml]

now we just need to wait till the aliens attack

... as long as they land in a very specific area of the earth, close to the France/Switzerland border.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Interoperable]

I wonder what happens to the graphite beam dumps and surrounding material after multiple exposures to the beam. There must be a lot of imperfections generated in the carbon lattice as well as a whole mess of exotic, radioactive by-products (of course, the truly exotic ones would be short-lived). I believe I read that the entire LHC tunnel becomes fairly radioactive as the occasional proton smashes into the walls of the tube and sprays a particle shower around the area of the impact.

Another fascinating example of the huge energies involved is the energy stored in the magnetic field that contains the particle ring. In an emergency it rakes about 10 minutes to dissipate the field energy, which is accomplished by attaching that magnets to enormous banks of resistors. There are all sorts of components of the accelerator that each store enough energy while running to do some serious damage; the safety systems alone are an amazing engineering accomplishment.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Interoperable]

The damage in the breakdown was all caused by the energy stored in the magnets...

Which is an incredible amount of energy! From what I gather, the LHC has 1232 main bending magnets in the ring. Each has an inductance of 0.11 H and a current of 11796 A. Those who have an electrodynamics course or two in their background can do the math! (For those who don't, it's 7.7 MJ per magnet, close to 10 GJ for the entire accelerator.) For those who prefer DC (Discovery Channel) units to SI units, that's just over 2 tonnes of TNT worth of energy.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Interoperable]

For completeness, I should point out that 11796 A is, I think, the current required to capture a 7 TeV beam.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[zevans]

so it's not even powerful enough as a ray gun to boil water, let alone burn the skin of those superpowered aliens.

You're right, but for the wrong reasons. The 7 TeV is the energy of A SINGLE PROTON in the beam.
If you let 'em have it with the entire beam at full luminosity, it's the equivalent of 87kg of TNT.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[pookemon]

As long as the Aliens aren't armed with Bagels - we'll be ok.

Re:No collisions yet, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

A deep whole? A wild whole appears? On the hole I think your speeling needs help.

Translation into sensible units

[Eudial]

If you, like me, are not accustomed to seeing electron volts in this dumbed down prefix-less format, you'll be grateful to find that I've translated the orders of magnitude in the article into a more conventional form:

1 trillion electron volts = 1 TeV
1 billion electron volts = 1 GeV

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

If you, like me, are not accustomed to seeing electron volts in this dumbed down prefix-less format, you'll be grateful to find that I've translated the orders of magnitude in the article into a more conventional form:

1 trillion electron volts = 1 TeV
1 billion electron volts = 1 GeV

You're being stupid actually. Don't try to act smart by saying you failed to comprehend what 1 trillion of x means, because that makes you look more retarded than those seem to think would understand it.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Dystopian Rebel]

I've translated the orders of magnitude in the article into a more conventional form:

1 trillion electron volts = 1 TeV
1 billion electron volts = 1 GeV

Is that a French billion or an American billion?

Re:Translation into sensible units

[wizardforce]

1 billion electron volts = 1.6*10^-10 Joules/particle
1 trillion electron volts = 1.6*10^-7 Joules/particle.
The energy of each individual particle is tiny by comparison with things that most people encounter but there are trillions of them whizzing around the LHC its self and that adds up quickly.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem is that Trillion and Billion mean different amounts to different nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

Long Scale/Short Scale

So, I guess I could look up what the Tevatron did and compare, but I'm way too lazy for that.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the wimp (American) billion.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

Something fun to think on:
the Earth is routinely hit by cosmic rays with energies on the order of EeV, that is, 10^19 eV.

1 EeV = 10 million TeV. The LHC is going to accelerate particles to 7 TeV.

Our universe is amazing.

(given, these magnitude EeV particles are very, very, very rare, and the LHC is accelerating LOTS of particles. Still, darn cool factoids)

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Macrat]

How much is that in gigawatts?

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Eudial]

I took it as American, as the article speaks of having just pushed something from (large number) billion to (small number) trillion. Not of an enormous leap between (large number) billion to (small number) trillion.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[EEGeek]

Umm is that the American definition of 1 trillion and 1 billion (1x10^12, 1x10^9 respectively) or the British definition of 1 trillion and 1 billion (1x10^18, 1x10^12 respectively)?

This could be the difference between ground breaking research and a black hole that swallows us up. Remember the infamous Mars probe that crashed because NASA couldn't convert betweem the Imperial and SI systems.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1 TeV is per particle, so beam power depends on particles per second as well.
 

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm is that the American definition of 1 trillion and 1 billion (1x10^12, 1x10^9 respectively) or the British definition of 1 trillion and 1 billion (1x10^18, 1x10^12 respectively)?

This could be the difference between ground breaking research and a black hole that swallows us up. Remember the infamous Mars probe that crashed because NASA couldn't convert betweem the Imperial and SI systems.

According to wikipedia, Britain also now uses the Short Scale system, which is what you're calling the American one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA this is more useful

One proton at 1 TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito.

When a beam is fully packed with 300,000 billion protons with 7 TeV energy — the goal of the LHC — it is like an aircraft carrier traveling at 20 knots.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the first time I was made aware of the confusion of these terms. Thank you. But judging from what I can read, the the English words "billion" and "trillion" always refers to the American short scale usage. Even in Britain.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Sgt. CoDFish]

With anything scientific, people generally talk about giga (G) being 1x10^9. That's an American billion.

A French/British billion (1x10^12) is tera (T) in SI prefixes.

So, since we take 1 eV to be 1.60x10^-19 J (to 3 sig. figs.), 1TeV (units are case sensitive) is:

1.6x10^-19 x 1x10^12 =

1.60x10^-7 J, or, with SI prefixes, 160 nJ (nanojoules, 10^-9)

(Strictly speaking, the Joule isn't the SI standard. In base units, the Joule is:

m^2.kg.s^-2.

because W (energy) = F (force, in newtons, which is also not an SI base unit) * d (distance, in metres, which is a base unit)
F (force, N) = m (mass, in kilogrammes, a base unit) * acceleration (in ms^-2, which is expressed in base units)
So W = mad or, in units, kg * ms^-2 * m. Which simplifies to give the unit above.

But everyone just uses J.)

You may or may not have known all that, but other people may benefit. Disclaimer: I don't claim to be perfectly right, but this is my understanding of the SI units, and it's served me well so far.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[WaXHeLL]

Actually, speaking from someone who works in a related field, using the prefix-less format is the accepted way of writing these numbers:

MeV (1,000,000), GeV (1,000,000,000), TeV (1,000,000,000,000), etc

As a fyi, TeV is actually tetra-electron volts.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[vlm]

How much is that in gigawatts?

Modded as funny, but its a semi serious question. Power = volts times amps.

Volts, well, you know, they were running at .450 TeV and eventually the thing will run at 7 TeV, supposedly.

Amps, I googled for LHC beam current and get answers ranging from 180 mA (unknown date) to 530 mA (design as of 1999).

So, multiply them up and you get somewhere between 80 and 3710 gigawatts.

Energy equals power multiplied by time. Power is immense, time would be just about zilch, multiply them together and you probably get something vaguely around a billionth of a gigawatt-hour, plus or minus a couple orders of magnitude.

You could probably estimate time by imagining shorting the beam out by completely, instantly, blocking the tube. Since the particles run about the speed of light, the time would be about the circumference of the accelerator divided by the speed of the speed of light.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[sconeu]

As a fyi, TeV is actually tetra-electron volts.

That's a lot of tropical fish!

I think you meant Tera election volts.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[karnal]

[quote]I think you meant Tera election volts.[/quote]

Please don't vote for Tera.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Maladius]

3.115 x 10^(-19) Gigawatt-hours...if you really wanted to know.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[kai_hiwatari]

but eV is energy and gigwatts is power

Re:Translation into sensible units

[QuantumRiff]

Just short of One Point Twenty one. But they are almost there!

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm

Each proton beam at full intensity will consist of 2808 bunches per beam.
Each bunch will contain 1.15×1011 protons per bunch at the start of nominal fill.
few cm. long
with transverse dimensions of the order a mm, but in a collider as small as possible at the collision point (LHC - 16 microns fully squeezed)
The particles in the LHC are ultra-relativistic and move at 0.999997828 times the speed of light at injection and 0.999999991 the speed of light at top energy

Energy in beam
Total beam energy at top energy, nominal beam, 362 MJ
2808 bunches * 1.15 1011 protons @ 7 TeV each. = 2808*1.15*1011*7*1012*1.602*10-19 Joules = 362 MJ per beam

British aircraft carrier
HMS Illustrious and Invincible weigh 20,000 tons all-up and fighting which is 2 x 107 kg. These are babies compared with the USS Harry S. Truman (Nimitz-class) - 88,000 tons.
Energy of nominal LHC beam = 362 MJ or 3.62 x 108 J
so 1/2 m v2 = 0.5 * 2*107 * v2 = 3.62*108
so v2 is 36.2 and v is 6.0 m/s or 11.7 knots (or around 5.6 knots if you're an American aircraft carrier)
(1 knot = 1.852 km/hour)

Subaru equivalent
Kerb weight 3140 kg plus a light person 3200 kg
1/2 m v2 = 0.5 * 3200 * v2 = 3.62*108 gives 1712 kph

Melting Copper
Melting point of copper: 1356 K - our magnets are at 2 K so the temperature rise needed is 1354 K
Specific heat capacity of copper: 385 Jkg-1K-1
Specific latent heat of fusion (energy required to convert a solid at its melting point into a liquid at the same temperature): 205000 Jkg-1
So to melt 1 kg of copper in the LHC we need (1354*385 + 205000) J
With one beam - 362 MJ - we can melt 362 106/(1354*385 + 205000) kg = 498.4 kg of copper
So at nominal beam current the two LHC beams together could melt nearly one tonne of copper.

TGV
400 tons
0.5 * 400000 * v^2 = 3.62*10^8 therefore one beam = one TGV at around 150 km/h

TNT
The energy content of TNT is 4.68MJ/kg (Beveridge 1998).
362/4.68 = 77.4 kg of TNT

Tevatron (proton/anti-proton)
980 GeV beam energy - 36 bunches of 2.3 e11 protons (July 2006) gives an energy per beam around 1.3 MJ
LHC > 200 times this.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[bill_mcgonigle]

1 trillion electron volts = 1 TeV

Or the average kinetic energy of a flying mosquito.

European, I'd imagine.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Graysccale]

I volted for Tera !

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Artraze]

I am surprised that no one pointed this out yet, but eV is a unit of energy; it is the energy of one electron accelerated across one Volt. So the relevant equation here is Power = Energy/Time. Thus the real equation is:

energy (Energy) * flux (# of particles / time)

However, as current is, essentially, a charge flux, the particle flux is:

current (Charge/time) / particle_charge (Charge)

However, you ended up with the right answer because the particle_charge term you neglected is equal to the one you neglected in the energy term (E=charge*Volts) namely the elementary charge. So to write the whole thing out:

energy * current / particle_charge

(elementary_charge * voltage) * current / particle_charge

When particle_charge==elementary_charge:

voltage * current

It's a little pedantic, but it is important to note that eV != V, and also that if they accelerate something other than protons or electrons, then your simplistic calculation would be wrong (through at that point Amps is a somewhat ambiguous/improper measurement and probably wouldn't be given anyway).

Re:Translation into sensible units

[whoisisis]

It turns out to be just about 1.21 jiggawatts.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[AndersOSU]

which will generate a library of congress worth of data every ke.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Eudial]

Actually, speaking from someone who works in a related field, using the prefix-less format is the accepted way of writing these numbers:

MeV (1,000,000), GeV (1,000,000,000), TeV (1,000,000,000,000), etc

As a fyi, TeV is actually tetra-electron volts.

As someone who also works in a related field, I say that's a very odd convention. If you have something like 3.10 MeV, it is obvious how many significant digits you have, but if you say 310,000,000 eV, you need some special notation to express that information.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[ThreeGigs]

Que Tera Tera?

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

eV != V

Re:Translation into sensible units

[pjt33]

Not consistently.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[mdwh2]

A French/British billion (1x10^12) is tera (T) in SI prefixes.

A British billion is 10^9, same as the US billion - it's been that way for decades. Since the BBC is a UK organisation, they'll be using this system.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[mdwh2]

I'm amused at the idea that people who dislike things being "dumbed down" need someone to do this basic conversion for them :)

Re:Translation into sensible units

[selven]

Tetra-electron volts? As in four of them? I'm pretty sure it is "tera".

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Anonymous Coward]

one point twenty-one jigga-watts

Re:Translation into sensible units

[qmaqdk]

I've translated the orders of magnitude in the article into a more conventional form:

1 trillion electron volts = 1 TeV
1 billion electron volts = 1 GeV

Is that a French billion or an American billion?

French. An American billion is 977 American millions, which in turn is 907 American thousands.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[Eudial]

It happens pretty often. Media likes to mutilate useful information into weird units. Like libraries of congress; sports related units like olympic sized swimming pools, or football fields; in units of the things related to the solar system, like the distance to the sun/the moon/mars, the circumference of the earth; units of commodity production per unit of time, like comparisons to the number of shoes produced in America every hour, etc. While it tells you that it's "a lot", it the format it's presented in is utterly useless.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[vlm]

I was modeling the accelerator in my head as a simple electrostatic "potential drop" linear as a simplification of the very complicated circular thing that the LHC is.

At the target, there is no way to tell the difference between getting hit by a 7 terravolt linear and a 7 TeV LHC, the difference is in the construction.

Since the linear model is basically a 7 TV battery with a certain beam current flowing across it. Stick a V*A wattmeter on the linear and you get watts. It is a valid model... Like sticking a wattmeter on a XRay machine...

It is simpler to build a LHC than a 7 TV linear, so thats why we have a LHC instead of a linear.

eV does equal V in a singly charged linear accelerator.

Re:Translation into sensible units

[zevans]

eV does equal V in a singly charged linear accelerator.

I see where you're going with this, and indeed that is the definition - the energy imparted to an electron as it passes through a p.d. of 1V.

But the differences are many: a current flows -against- electrons, and the electrons move at drift velocity. Current is not necessarily the individual electrons themselves moving at that energy. Current is probably not even a meaningful concept if you're talking about 1 electron charge. (I can't remember how many Coloumbs that is, but it ain't many.)

The rest mass of a proton is 1830 times greater, which alters all sorts of behaviours and tipping points when it comes to collisions/diffraction/scattering/interaction. (And the binding energy of nucleons is totally different to the various Pauli spin things that go on with leptons.)

The way a hadron beam deposits energy into a target is totally different to leptons at any energy.

Hadrons and leptons behave totally differently at any sort of subatomic scale and energy - even MeV.

The strong force is dominant in quark interactions; the electroweak force is dominant with electrons.

So you may be right in terms of energy flow, and I expect a mathematical physicist could prove your equivalence in terms of Lagrangians, but I'm still not convinced this is a useful analogy at any sort of level - unless you can think of one?

Of course we could all just work in metric mosquitos. :-)

Re:Translation into sensible units

[xupere]

Great Scott!

If only....

[Metatron]

now we could feed THAT into a flux capacitor.....

Re:If only....

[Kjella]

...and a DeLorean, which is so the obvious choice.

Re:If only....

[jDeepbeep]

now we could feed THAT into a flux capacitor.....

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

Re:If only....

[Anonymous Coward]

We could go back in time and stop the LHC before the disaster!

Re:If only....

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

That doesn't make sense. Is it meant to? Do you know what a Beowulf cluster is?

Re:If only....

[Wraithlyn]

Sense, schmense. It's clear that a Beowulf cluster of LHCs would be AWESOME. Like Natalie Portman hot grits awesome.

In your heart, you know it's true too.

Re:If only....

[whoisisis]

1 TeV is about 1.21 GW

Question about particle accelerators

[reginaldo]

So I understand that more energy means faster moving protons and anti-protons. How does this equivocate to finding, say, the Higgs-Boson more easily?

I understand that particles moving at 99.91% c are going to be observable for a longer period of time due to the Lorentz factor, but is that the sole benefit of this massive energy upgrade? Anyone have recommended reading for me?

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of a particle accelerator as a massive microscope. The magnification of this "microscope" increases at roughly the square root of the energy.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/lhc-sets-new-energy-record-full-power-still-year-away.ars

The lowest energy supersymmetric particles are expect to reside in the 1TeV range, which is just barely in the detectable range of the Tevatron and the current LHC operating energy. But, to observe these particles, the LHC would have to stay at that energy for some time—of the order of many months—to generate a statistically significant sample of collisions.

Instead, the plan is to continue to increase the energy until ~3.5TeV is reached. At this energy, it will take considerably less time to generate a statistically significant sample. So, by not taking data now, the LHC staff are really saving themselves some time, as well as widening the net for higher-energy particles.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[necro81]

The value is less in the time dilation you get at such high speeds, but rather the equivalent mass. The particles of interest to these scientists have a characteristic mass, which by E=mc^2, means they also have a certain characteristic energy.

(at relativistic speeds I seem to recall it isn't as simple as E=mc^2, but that's the gist of it).

If a particle is really heavy, a low-energy particle accelerator is highly unlikely (basically never) going to find it. This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist.

In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight. Because we haven't yet found it in our most powerful accelerators, it stands to reason that it is at least more heavy (i.e., more energetic) than 1-2 TeV. Most, but not all, physicists believe the LHC, at 7 TeV, should be energetic enough to find the Higgs boson - if what we think we know about it and particle physics is all correct.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Scrameustache]

Anyone have recommended reading for me?

This should answer all your questions.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[TooMuchToDo]

My understanding is that the faster you can move particles around, the harder you can smash them together. The harder you can smash them together, the easier it is to see the fundamental building blocks of those pieces. Imagine a car wreck with both cars doing 50mph. Now imagine the same wreck with each car doing 100mph. Which will break the cars into smaller pieces.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

The higher energy is needed to form hevier particels, since the energy of the collision transforms into the mass and energy of new particels.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[wizardforce]

To create a particle like the Higgs boson, the collision energy needs to at least equal the mass of the particle you're trying to create. The higher energy collisions in the LHC increase the odds of finding the Higgs because of this. THe mass of the Higgs isn't known. However, the more collisions we do at higher energies, the thinner the range of masses the Higgs can be.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[reginaldo]

Thanks for the response! Not to sound like a 3 year old, but why? Wouldn't length contraction cancel out the effects of time dilation.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Erikderzweite]

>Thanks for the response! Not to sound like a 3 year old, but why? Wouldn't length contraction cancel out the effects of time dilation?

Don't know about you, but I'll be pretty happy and surprised if my nephew is going to ask similar questions when he turns 3.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[EsbenMoseHansen]

In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight.

According to wikipedia, if the standard model is correct, there i 95% confidentiality that the lower bound is 170GeV and the upper is 186GeV

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[pjotrb123]

This may be of help:
http://www.snotr.com/video/3393

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[anarchyboy]

The particle would not see its own time-dilation so to speak, in the particles rest frame it still decays very quickly and the length contraction then allows it to travel further. From the lab frame the particle is time dilated so decays slowly but the lab equipment is not length contracted in that frame so there are no length contraction effects.

Also with particle accelerators it is very much the energy of the collision that matters, as the particles velocity increases pushing it with more energy actually only increases the speed by a very little amount since it can nevery be greater than c, you can however keep increasing the energy of the particle.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop reading these fail answers. It's like a convention of wanna-be physicists and some physicists unable to explain simple concepts to simple people.

Look, ALL this shit is is just a better *microscope*. Visual wavelength microscope generally cannot resolve stuff more 200nm across.

    http://www.ehow.com/about_5147224_resolution-microscope.html

Why? Because the visible light wavelength,

    http://www.yorku.ca/eye/spectrum.gif

Now, the higher the energy, the lower wavelength and higher resolving power. This is one reason behind using electron microscopes. Electrons interact better with matter than X-rays (comparable wavelength) so you get brighter picture. It is also easier to focus electrons, unlike X-rays.

Particle accelerators are used as a very bright light source with very tiny wavelength. Higher energy means you can see smaller crap. Yes, it's just a microscope.

Now, why are they using protons and not electrons? Simple. Electrons are considered point-line with no internal structure (shown experimentally at very tiny scales). Protons, on other hand, have internal structure. That's it!

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

May I add that a 7 TeV beam means collisions at 14 Tev.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[sjames]

The particles they're interested in have a given mass which is equivalent to energy as in E=mc^2

In order for a particle collision to result in the production of a given particle, the energy of the collision must be at least the mass of the particle. In practice, since several particles tend to be produced in a collision, the energy must be considerably higher. Slowing time is helpful, but is not the primary reason for accelerating the particles.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[lennier]

"The particle would not see its own time-dilation so to speak, in the particles rest frame it still decays very quickly and the length contraction then allows it to travel further. From the lab frame the particle is time dilated so decays slowly but the lab equipment is not length contracted in that frame so there are no length contraction effects. "

Here's something that still confuses me about special relativity: wouldn't both the particle and the accelerator see *each other* as length contracted? So the particle should see the accelerator as contracted, therefore it travels faster... but the accelerator sees the particle as contracted, so shouldn't it travel slower?

How does SR resolve this? Or is it just a shrug and 'one hand clapping, the zen you can understand is not the true zen' kind of thing?

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Daspaz]

Many of the other replies are in the right spirit, but are also WRONG on an important point. Short answer: It's all about probability! Ok, to clarify. It is true that to create a particle you need a collision energy of at least its rest-mass energy. But this is _NOT_ the reason for the increase in energy! (At least not directly) Those who have said that the LHC was designed to find the Higgs, and operates above 1 TeV for the first time and then concluded that this means that the Higgs is heavier than 1 TeV are misguided. The Higgs is in fact likely between 110-165 GeV-ish in mass from previous experiments. So why the increase in energy? Well, we're producing an incredible number of collisions, but the vast majority of them don't produce a Higgs boson. It's just not that likely. When two particles collide, it is impossible to say exactly what particles will be created. You can only calculate the PROBABILITY of a certain particle being created. This is in precisely the same spirit as only being able to find the probability of a particle's position in elementary quantum mechanics. So to finally answer your question: When two particles collide, the PROBABILITY of the collision producing a Higgs boson (We call this the 'cross-section') increases with energy. We naturally combine this with a vast increase in the number of collisions per second. More collisions + higher probability per collision = much better chances of creating a bunch of Higgses.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[lennier]

"This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist."

Another 3-year-old question that bugs me: If they're that big, how can they be 'fundamental'? Doesn't 'big' kinda imply 'composed of smaller things'?

I presume things like the Higgs are 'actually' second-order configurations of quarks or waveforms which we just arbitrarily have chosen to call 'fundamental' rather than 'resonance', right? Because that would be a sensible conclusion, right? (I know, I know, it's modern physics, so sense need not apply... but...)

Another really dumb question: 'how BIG is a photon and what SHAPE is it'? A radio-frequency EM wave can get pretty big in space and time - like several meters to kilometers long for ELF. Its size and shape can be verified by the antenna you build. That entire wave is associated with a number of photons. So... to the extent that those photons actually 'exist' in any real sense and are not just an abstract bookkeeping measure, those photons must somehow extend in time and space way beyond the Planck length. To the extent that they are mapped onto the physical EM wave, they must have a 'shape'. But nobody seems to talk much about this; the question seems to be answered by being defined as invalid. How *does* QED deal with macroscopic quantum entities like ELF radio-frequency photons?

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. I imagined that the 50mph wreck involved 2 cars made of legos, and the 100mph one was the flintstones cars.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[anarchyboy]

The particle is to all intents a point like object so doesn't have a length to contract, in the case of an object with length then yes both frames see the other as contracted.

Special relativty is completely self conistent in a mathematical view point. From a physical one it can get confusing I would suggest looking up the ladder "parradox" as one such example.

One way to simplify matters is to write down all of the space-time cooridinates of events in you problem in one frame, then peform lorentz boosts to get the result in the other frame and measure lengths etc in that frame rather than applying the time dilation and length contraction formulae blindly

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

The lower bound on the mass of the Higgs boson (assuming a Standard Model Higgs) is about 114 GeV (from the LEP experiment, which was the previous experiment at CERN). Just because the Tevatron at Fermilab with a total center-of-mass energy of 2 TeV hasn't seen it, does not mean the Higgs is heavier than 2 TeV. It's much more complicated than that. Even though we collide protons at 2 TeV, the actual collision energy is much less typically only a few 100 GeV because only one quark/antiquark from each proton/antiproton actual collide, which carry only a fraction of the total energy. The problem of finding the Higgs at the Tevatron is its tiny production cross section via quark-antiquark annihilation. The Tevatron is most sensitive in the range around 170 GeV. If the Higgs exists, we have very likely already produced quite a few, it's just impossible to find them in the huge amount of background.
The reason the LHC with its higher total energy helps is because at such high proton energies there are a lot of gluons with energies of around 100 GeV inside the proton, i.e. the LHC is essentially a gluon collider. Going from 2 TeV to 14 TeV actually helps quite a lot here. The Higgs production cross section via gluon-gluon fusion is much higher and in addition the LHC also has a higher overall luminosity which is why we expect to find the Higgs at the LHC. However, even at the LHC the backgrounds are large and so it will take probably at least 3 years of running to have enough statistics to find it.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Maury Markowitz]

> So I understand that more energy means faster moving protons and anti-protons.
> How does this equivocate to finding, say, the Higgs-Boson more easily?

In the quantum world you have to forget about "particles" in the classical sense. There is no spoon.

Think, instead, of a big bag with a bunch of quantities in it. Reach into the bag and you can pull something out, shouting "electron"! The chance that you'll say "electron" and not "proton" is based on what you put into the bag, you can only get out something that meets the conservation laws. So if you put in 0 charge, you might get a neutron out, or an electron and a positron, both have net charge 0.

Which one of those you get depends on the rest of the things you put in, spin, isospin, color, momentum, etc. Chances are you'll get the set of particles that has the lowest energy and still meets the requirements. However, you'll always have a chance of getting the oddballs even if there is a low-energy solution.

The reason for high energies in accelerators is to fill up the bag. That way you can reach in and pull out a single really big particle instead of the bunch of little ones you put into it. If the Higgs really is in the 115 to 180 GeV range, as currently believed, you're going to need to put in a WHOLE LOT of energy so you have a lot left over. And even then, you're going to have to try a WHOLE LOT of times before you're going to see it. It's all statistics at that point.

> Anyone have recommended reading for me?

Yes, "The Great Design: Particles, Fields, and Creation". A bit low-rent, but does cover the topics.

Maury

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[ceoyoyo]

There are a few ways of looking at it. The more energy you pump into a particle, the shorter it's wavelength gets. The size of features you can see is proportional to the wavelength. Smaller wavelengths mean you can see smaller features.

The more important factor when you're looking for new particles is that, because E=mc^2, you need a certain amount of energy in an interaction for particles of a given mass to be produced. If you want to see something heavier, you need to input more energy. To do that you give the particles you're colliding more energy - i.e., you make them go faster.

The God Particle" by Leon Lederman is a good book and covers the history of accelerator development.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Carnildo]

(at relativistic speeds I seem to recall it isn't as simple as E=mc^2, but that's the gist of it).

The full equation is

E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2

where E is energy, m is mass, p is momentum, and c is the speed of light. The "m^2 c^4" part is known as the object's "rest mass".

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Rising Ape]

Resolution of this apparent paradox lies in the fact that events that are simultaneous in one frame are not simultaneous in another. This is usually illustrated with a (presumably very fast) train passing through a station. If both were at rest, the train would be a bit longer than the platform.

For an observer on the platform, the train is contracted so appears the same length as the platform - so the front of the train is aligned with the front of the platform at the same time as the rear of the train is aligned with the rear.

For an observer on the train, the platform is contracted so it remains shorter than the train. However, the front of the train reaches the front of the platform at a different time to the rear of the train reaching the rear of the platform.

For both observers, a clock in the other reference frame will appear to be running slowly (time dilation).

Therefore, both observers views make physical sense, and indeed each one can calculate what the situation would be for the other one. But you need all three (relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and length contraction) for it all to be consistent.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

finally a car analogy.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[budgenator]

Actually the amount of "speed" increase is trivial, going from 99.991 to 99.99991 doesn't amount to much. The real meat and potatoes of it is the mass increase of the protons which means they carry a lot more momentum.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Sterops]

Another 3-year-old question that bugs me: If they're that big, how can they be 'fundamental'? Doesn't 'big' kinda imply 'composed of smaller things'?

Not at all. "Fundamental" means they are the basis of several theoretical considerations. Here, the Higgs boson, if it really exists, should explain why the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force are not identical. Additionally, the Higgs boson, as an elementary particle, lives on its own. It is not a mixture of other particles, according to the Standard Theory.

Another really dumb question: 'how BIG is a photon and what SHAPE is it'?

According the the Standard Theory of physics, photons have no shape (they are points, in a way). Thus, no size. They can be mapped, as you said, to an actual EM wave only because they are MANY of them traveling at the same time to your receiver.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[RedBear]

To be pedantic, I believe you meant "equate", meaning roughly "evaluates to the same as".

"Equivocate" means to use waffling words to give ambiguous or partial answers, as in saying, "not that I know of" rather than "no".

Also, I'm no special relativity expert but I'm not sure where you got the idea that the particles will be observable for a longer period of time simply because they are going faster. Things either get faster or slow down, you can't have both at the same time.

Perhaps if you took the entire LHC facility, put it on a spaceship and accelerated the ship to close to the speed of light and then performed your experiments and observations on the ship and beamed the information back to Earth, then you would find that the experiments and observations on the ship were happening in a slower time frame. But these particles are being accelerated within the same gravity well in which we are observing them. The particles, the facility and the observers are all traveling through space-time at the same speed from the same location (Earth).

It's always been my understanding that the main purpose of working toward higher-energy collisions is because the more energy there is in a particle collision, the more energy will be released and the more basic fundamental particles will be observed. Basically, the particles get broken into smaller pieces, and the pieces break into even smaller pieces. As the energy level goes up, we get closer to replicating the energy conditions during the initial stages of the Big Bang when all matter in the universe was created, and we discover more about the subatomic building-blocks of matter and how they behave.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[budgenator]

I believe that should be E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 q^2

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[lgw]

This is "the problem" with the standard model. How can there be dozens (hundreds?) of fundamental particles? How can a fundamental particle decay? How can fundamental particles be so massive? The standard model just seems "wrong" for all of these non-scientific, aesthetic reasons. No one likes it, but no one has anything better (and this hasn't changed for decades thanks to the horrific string theory boondoggle).

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[lgw]

Mass does not increase with speed. Will that legend never die? Momentum increases with speed (more than Newton would predict), purely because of time dilation. Energy increases as well. Time dilation works for both momentum and energy, while mass increase doesn't. It's a pointlessly confusing metaphor, and just plain wrong.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[zevans]

Recommended reading: The God Particle by Leon Lederman. He was head of CERN for a while and won his Nobel prize for discovering the bottom/beauty quark at Fermilab. This is THE best book I've read on the topic. Just bear in mind that when he wrote it the SSC was going to be the next big project and LHC is largely fulfilling that role instead, as it turns out.

The period of observation isn't really a factor, because one of the things that makes this tricky is that the heavier particles such as the hypothetical Higgs decay into something else very very quickly anyway.

You don't observe these kinds of particles directly; you see the cascades of particles that they decay into pass through your detector, and then you prove that the only way that combination of particles could have appeared travelling in those directions is if they are the product of the hypothesised particle.

This article talks about how Fermilab recently went through this process for a top quark, which is a pretty similar deal. The top quark is a heavy particle you won't see in most interactions until you get to some pretty big energy densities, just like the Higgs; the difference is the energies are somewhat lower, so Fermilab has got there already.

CMS and ATLAS are both designed to ensure you detect EVERYTHING known that comes out of the collisions so you can also work out what went straight through your detectors, by looking at what energy has not been accounted for in what you picked up.

Or, there might be a whole other bunch of particles produced at 7 TeV, and no Higgs at all; plenty of papers have been written on what you might expect to see instead. Other explanations for inertial mass are available.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[moozoo]

>fundamental building blocks of those pieces Just be aware that its false to believe that because X and Y flew out that X and Y where inside the particles before it collided. That is a macroscopic concept of reality.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[John Hasler]

> No one likes it, but no one has anything better (and this hasn't changed for
> decades thanks to the horrific string theory boondoggle).

What is your theory?

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[budgenator]

show me the math

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

General covariance and geometrized units makes this:

But you need all three (relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and length contraction) for it all to be consistent.

easier. In particular, with c = 1 and ignoring gravitation (since we are dealing with a very weak potiential gradient, although equivalently we can set G = 1) time dilation and length contraction are identical, since the metric for rulers along all four of our 3+1 spacetime dimensions is the second.

I say "easier" because simultaneity is a mess involving e.g. an equivalence relation that is invariant under an automorphism group on spacetime that is the identity relation of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group in which the inertial frames of measurers trying to agree on simultaneity must be stable under some subgroup. On the other hand, with fully geometrized units (c = G = k_B = k_c = hbar = 1) you can fudge around it in the weak field limit by doing a strict transactionalist approach involving event/carrier/observer chains and an underlying scalar field that is the ratio of seconds between local and remote measurements by a chosen measurer (e.g. one who sees no dipole anisotropy in the CMB and who is not experiencing acceleration and who is at a great distance) with a reliable local frequency standard and an unobstructed view of reliable remote frequency standards. (The scalar would be lower in inter-cluster space and higher within clusters and galaxies and very high near structures with high mass-energies, experiencing high accelerations, or moving at high velocities relative to the chosen measurer, and so it roughly corresponds to spacetime curvature). Almost certainly no other observer would agree on the configuration of scalar field at any given instant which is why this is a fudge.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[Anonymous Coward]

show me your boobs! big hairy boobs, yum...

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[lgw]

Any decent course on relativity can show you the math, but momentum diverts from Newtonion by lambda, and energy by lambda^2. It's the 't', not the 'm', that's affected.

As a simple example, if you write F = dp/dt, as Newton did, then time dilation gives the right results in each reference frame. If you add energy to the picture, say an elastic collision at relativistic speeds, time dilation still gives the right answer in each reference frame, and "mass increases" just doesn't. Also, from the work to show how momentum and energy are conserved in such a case, proof of the famous "E=mc^2" pops out, which is very neat.

Re:Question about particle accelerators

[linoleo]

So, by not taking data now, the LHC staff are really saving themselves some time

Which is an excellent example of the value of slacking.

There's something very important

[circletimessquare]

I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the streams... It would be bad...

Re:There's something very important

[skine]

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?

Re:There's something very important

[zx75]

Also, do not look into laser with remaining eye.

Re:There's something very important

[l3ert]

Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

Re:There's something very important

[Andreaskem]

This guy would agree.

Re:There's something very important

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

Re:There's something very important

[Anonymous Coward]

This must be fake. Proton beams are in ultra high vacuum (UHV) - how are you supposed to head into a UHV chamber?

You're on to me Powers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's part of my plan to destroy the Earth unless I'm paid *da da dum* One Million Dollars!

Yours;

Dr. Evil.

Wow... I wonder about the electricity bill.

[viraltus]

I really wish I could pay that bill... sigh.

Re:Wow... I wonder about the electricity bill.

[furby076]

I highly recommend bankruptcy. That is one big freakin bill.

Re:Wow... I wonder about the electricity bill.

[bkpark]

I really wish I could pay that bill... sigh.

But would you pay that bill if you could? I personally wouldn't.

Re:Wow... I wonder about the electricity bill.

[viraltus]

NO NO... I said "I wish I could pay" NOT that I would! of course ;)

Re:Wow... I wonder about the electricity bill.

[viraltus]

That is why I wish I _could_ pay it ;)

Don't rush it...

[Anonymous Coward]

This amount of testing is not unusual for something this complex and costly. Have some patience. The LHC has already had plenty of down-time caused by unforeseen failures.

I work in the satellite industry, and it is not uncommon for a satellite to undergo 2+ years of testing before it gets launched. This kind of extensive up-front testing is not a matter of too much red tape, nor of being overly cautious. It is the result of decades of hard lessons - billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet, and in some cases, lives being lost, because of rushing a flawed product to delivery.

The LHC is already on shaky ground. Funding for this kind of science is extremely difficult to obtain even in good times, and a major system failure at this point may lead to the LHC getting shut down for good. And if that happens, it will be a VERY long time before funding for this kind of thing becomes available again. It takes a LOT of time to properly test a system this big and complex. So relax. The science will still be here when the testing is done.

Bl

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you feel something pulling on you today? It's a rather strange sensation.

LHC For Dummies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there an "LHC for dummies" out there somewhere?

Obviuosly this beast is muy importante to science so I'd like to have a better grasp of exactly what in the heck it's doing and how but I don't have the time to get a graduate degree in particle physics this week.

Re:LHC For Dummies?

[Maury Markowitz]

> Obviuosly this beast is muy importante to science

Indeed, in exactly the same way the World Series is to a baseball fan. Everyone will be watching a multi-billion dollar spectacle, even though we know deep down that the outcome is both easy to predict and completely unimportant.

Maury

Re:LHC For Dummies?

[John Hasler]

> ...the outcome is both easy to predict...

And your prediction is...

Re:LHC For Dummies?

[Lord Crc]

Well, CERN has a FAQ of sorts, 66 pages. Might be a good start, depending on how much detail you want.

In case anyone is curious if . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

The earth has been destroyed yet by the LHC you can check at

http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

No Science?

[CopaceticOpus]

They say that no science has been done yet, but now we know that 1.18 TeV is below the energy level at which higgs bosons travel back in time to disrupt supercollider experiments.

(Yes, I'm kidding.)

Mass, not time

[wowbagger]

Let me honor /. tradition and use a car analogy here:

If you smash 2 GM Metros together, you CANNOT put together 2 Grand Marquis from the debris - there just isn't enough metal.

However, if you smash 2 Peterbuilts together, you can, at least in theory, put together 2 Grand Marquis from that debris - there's enough metal.

-----

When you smash particles together, there has to be enough mass-energy (enough metal) to form the particles you are looking for, or they won't appear. Mass is energy, energy is mass, speed is kinetic energy, and thus mass.

The Higgs is somewhere north of 1TeV - how much north of that varies from theory to theory. If the Higgs is a Grand Marquis, right now, the Tevatron and the LHC are smashing together Tauruses. Soon, the LHC will be up to stretch limos. At full power, the LHC will be at the Hummer3 level.

And cosmic rays are at the freight train level, but since that's not happening in the lab, it does no good: what fun is a collision if nobody caught it on video?

Re:Mass, not time

[owlstead]

So what you're saying is that we could create 2 Grand Marquis if we accelerated 2 mini-Coopers to high enough speeds?

Re:Mass, not time

[MobyDisk]

So based on this, if I smash two sheets of paper together fast enough, I'll have enough mass-energy to build a car from the resulting debris? Or will the Lorentz factor mean that I could do it, but the resulting vehicle would only exist for a short period of time?

Re:Mass, not time

[wowbagger]

Actually, yes, if the paper is moving fast enough, you could. Of course, that would have to be REALLY REALLY fast - assume a sheet of paper to be roughly 100 grams (.1 kg), and a Grand Marquis wet is about 2000kg, the paper would have to be going at least 0.999999999c. Then you'd have to do it a bunch of times before 2 Grand Marquis popped out.

Cheaper to just get the dealer incentives and finance it yourself....

Re:Mass, not time

[wowbagger]

Let me correct a statement: when I said "The Higgs is somewhere north of 1TeV", what I meant was "the energies needed to form a Higgs within a reasonable period of time are north of 1TeV" - the actual mass is currently thought to be in the low hundreds of GeV.

If the Higgs were actually 1TeV in mass that would REALLY screw up the Standard Model.

(now, there are some theorized particles in the same family as the Higgs that are thought to be 1TeV or more, but....)

Re:Mass, not time

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you put enough kinetic energy in your two sheets of paper and smash them together, the resulting collision could have an energy which could be (through Einstein's formula) equivalent to the mass of the vehicle you want. What is critically missing here is a process to transform the energy of the collision into mass. Moreover, all kinds of energy are not equivalent in this respect: a big part of the collision energy would be radiated thermally into photons and would thus be "lost" for mass conversion (see this for the ultimate consequence).

Re:Mass, not time

[bkpark]

So based on this, if I smash two sheets of paper together fast enough, I'll have enough mass-energy to build a car from the resulting debris? Or will the Lorentz factor mean that I could do it, but the resulting vehicle would only exist for a short period of time?

Yes, provided that you build a car and an anti-car at the same time.

There are conservation laws beside from energy conservation. For one, to a good approximation, lepton number (i.e. number of electrons minus number of positrons) and baryon number (number of protons minus number of anti protons) are conserved, so if you started with energy and little else, for every proton (i.e. car) that you create, you must also create an anti-proton (i.e. anti-car).

Re:Mass, not time

[Nadaka]

I don't think you could get mini's going fast enough even if you dumped one of them out of a plane. I seem to remember something like this on mythbusters.

Re:Mass, not time

[Anonymous Coward]

As car analogies go, that one is a winner. Thank you. It's all as clear as an AMC Pacer's windows now.

Re:Mass, not time

[budgenator]

The lorentz factor means it would only exist in one spacial dimension that is coaxial to its momentum.

Re:Mass, not time

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally,
I get it.
I take 2 craps of equal size,put them through a really fast fan.
And eureka!
Endless crap

Re:Mass, not time

[Anonymous Coward]

what fun is a collision if nobody caught it on video?

Plenty, if you sell insurance...

Re:Mass, not time

[linoleo]

assume a sheet of paper to be roughly 100 grams

Love those ballpark estimates... so that 500-sheet pack I brought home the other day weighed more than my wife? I must have had a lot of spinach that day.

Try to imagine

[circletimessquare]

all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

unless facing gozer the gozerian ;-)

This looks serious

[ILoveBunnies]

Fermilab better send over another bird...

Superconductivity

[afortaleza]

Is superconductivity dependent on the amout of eletrons a wire can take ? I though it was only a matter of material am temperarure.

Re:Superconductivity

[Delwin]

... and strength of the magnetic field. Most (all?) known superconductors break down when exposed to very strong magnetic fields. More current = stronger field so there's a limit how much power you can pour through a superconductor before it loses it's properties and melts (or explodes, or whatever that particular one will do when it breaks down).

Well...

[TheDarkMaster]

Where is the LHC power plug to put my one trillion flux capacitor and get my new rig to work?

LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does anyone even KNOW if this stuff is safe? Is this going to be yet another climategate, where the public doesn't get informed of the TRUTH until it is almost too late? I certainly hope some clever hacker manages to find some incriminating evidence against the LHC so we can shut it down before the risks become too great.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Nadaka]

Its no less safe than the cosmic rays with millions of times the power that do occasionally hit the earth and have been doing so for billions of years. And yet we still exist.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[AshtangiMan]

This is some good humor. Well done.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it, though. I've seen others make the same claims, but like the criminals who promote the hoax of global warming, you provide no REAL evidence that it is true. The combination of HUGE amounts of government funding, with a real lack of credibility when it comes to the science, means that the LHC is another prime candidate for exposing as fraud. This is why I am a big fan of the good work being done by the folks over at LHC Defence. We need a MUCH better idea of the risks involved (as well as get a better idea of how realistic the research is) with this kind of thing before we allow it to go any further or allow it to receive any more taxpayer funding.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Maury Markowitz]

> Prove it, though

John Linsley (1963). "Evidence for a Primary Cosmic-Ray Particle with Energy 10^20 eV". Physical Review Letters 10: 146. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.10.146.

That one is about 20 million times more powerful that LCH. There's dozen of similar examples, here: http://tinyurl.com/yjgs4ae

Or do you mean "prove it though" as in "this guy was actually lying" as in "all these guys are actually lying" as in "9/11 is a coverup and everyone is lying"? In that case, why fear the LHC? After all, they're lying about actually having a machine, let alone doing anything with it. Why would you believe there's a danger when the real cover up is that it doesn't even exist in the first place?

Maury

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because as well all know from recent events, scientists would NEVER LIE to receive $BILLIONS in funding and to promote the ideals of big government. Who is the bigger fool, the fool or the fool who follows the fool.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think FRAUD is "funny". We are seeing the same kind of "hushing" and censorship that has been used to quiet skeptics of both climate change and intelligent design. Someone needs to hold these allmighty scientists criminally responsible for their lies regarding the risks that the LHC truly represents to all of us.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Nadaka]

Don't even bother. I shouldn't even have responded in the first place. He is either a troll or an ignorant fool. No amount of reason or facts can convince him. Its like talking to a moon landing conspiracy nut or a "computers are the Anti-Christ" evangelist.

Do you know the difference between a brick wall and an trolls mind? You can open both with a sledgehammer, but one leaves a dry red mess and the other leaves a wet red mess.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

used to quiet skeptics of both climate change and intelligent design

Woops, that should be "used to quiet both climate change skeptics and proponents of intelligent design". I think we have all heard quite enough from the "skeptics of intelligent design" (aka atheistic evolutionists).

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[lgw]

You've missed the lesson of climate-gate completely. What you should be worried about is not that the LHC willl destroy the world, but that the researchers will falsify the evidence of the Higgs boson (and line up friendly peers to rubberstamp the false data in review) in order to further some political agenda. And if there actually were a political agenda that mught be so furthered, then, yeah, it might be worth looking into. I'd be deeply suspicious of some surprising result that suddenly justifies all the years wasted on string theory, but other than that not so much.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[zevans]

The combination of HUGE amounts of government funding

No. Firstly, the amounts are tiny compared with the spend on many, many other government activities. There is no "huge" government spend, therefore there is no argument possible against a "huge" spend. Next!

with a real lack of credibility when it comes to the science, means that the LHC is another prime candidate for exposing as fraud.

Well, again, the LHC is the ideal device for exposing which of the current theories is worth pursuing, and which is simply, as you suggest, a gravy train.

This is why I am a big fan of the good work being done by the folks over at LHC Defence.

Well, I hope they are a little more open-minded than the tone of your post.

We need a MUCH better idea of the risks involved

You are aware there have already been several such independent exercises, right? What do you still need to know?

(as well as get a better idea of how realistic the research is)

Erm, that's what it's for. Switch it off and you'll never know.

before we allow it to go any further or allow it to receive any more taxpayer funding.

Good one. Remind me which country pulled funding for the SSC?

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[zevans]

Now you're mixing metaphors. Higgs isn't part of string theory. See what you mean, though.

Re:LHC-gate in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's like two identical cosmic rays colliding exactly head on inside our planet. That doesn't happen everyday or probably ever.

LHC The Movie

[pjotrb123]

For those who haven't seen it yet, here is a movie about how the LHC works; from single Hydrogen atoms to extremely powerful particle proton beams:
http://www.snotr.com/video/3393 (Flash movie alert)

Conversion Please...

[jameskojiro]

How much is that in 1.21 Jigawatt increments?

Obvious Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Over a trillion election votes is more than there are people on the planet! Until people start going to jail for this kind of thing, it's going to continue.

And who pays the bill?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Swiss?

1.18 billion volts...

[ebursey]

... as a scientific tool, I'd say it has a lot of potential. Ba-dum-bump

Re:1.18 billion volts...

[sconeu]

We are Ohm of Borg. Resistance is futile. Voltage, on the other hand, has potential.

Mod parent -1, Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

In other news

[SnarfQuest]

In other news, the Earth has been consumed by an artificial black hole. The mice are not amused at losing a second one.

The tragic thing is...

[billsayswow]

That much power, and the lights still dim when someone plugs in a hair dryer or heats a burrito in the microwave.

Children's song of the future...

[KazW]

The beams at the LHC go round and round, round and round, round and round.....

Sadness will soon follow

[sbrown123]

Eventually they will crank it to full power and.....nothing will happen. I'm sure they could always use it to burn DVD's or something.

Re:Sadness will soon follow

[John Hasler]

Aside from the fact there is a great deal that can and will be done with the machine in addition to looking for the Higgs, failing to find it would be far more interesting than finding it. The researchers would be thrilled, not saddened.

Re:Sadness will soon follow

[MistrX]

Well I understand their joy of rethinking about a lot of stuff in modern physics, since it's their field of interest (and it is very interesting, I admit), but some results are nice aswell from time to time.

I mean, whats the value of research? If I ask a question, I would like an answer. Sure it's nice that the answer is not easy to be found since that would be dull and an insult to my intellect at the same time. However, if I look for decades and decades and my research shows me everytime that I have to rethink everything I've ever done so far, I get quite demotivated.

Is this the part where anti-matter gets created?

[Anonymous Coward]

And then the bad guy steals the anti-matter and plants it in the Vatican?

Beam Current

[John Hasler]

So what's the beam current and how fast are they ramping it up? Multi-Tev collisions at very low beam currents won't produce enough events to be useful.

Photos of the beast in its full glory

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

TeV is not Trillion TeV is Tera

[Anonymous Coward]

Tev is Tera Electron Volt not Trillion Electron volt (like terabyte from gigabyte)

Trillion is several orders of magnitude more

Like a flying insect

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Wikipedia, the LHC operating at 1.18 trillion eV has the same energy as a flying mosquito. Lets hope he can't get out.

Ya but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya but what is it's Energy Star rating?

High pitch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure hope they do not have another liquid helium leak. It took months before the last BBC News reporters voice returned to normal levels.

Debt?

[minion]

Is there a way to convert these volts into dollars to help pay down our national debt? Oh wait, never mind, its only supposed to reach 7 trillion volts.. That wouldn't be enough to help pay off ObamaCare(tm).

Re:Debt?

[Dr_Axoo]

You are aware that the LHC is not a USA inc. project right?

Re:Debt?

[MistrX]

And that 'ObamaCare' costs less then the money they spend on keeping unhealthy businesses alive during the 'creditcrunch'?

I think that the discoveries that are promised with the LHC, for our understanding of the universe, is more valuable then as good as anything the financial sector did for us the last 15 years.
Don't forget: Better understanding of the universe --> better understanding of ourselves --> better understanding of anything in every other field. ;)

Pathetic

[quibbler]

The half-finished, mostly-paid-for SSC was slated at 20 TeV. You'll forgive my shrug at 1 TeV. This is an embarrassing footnote on the state of physics in modern civilization. Thanks Clinton.

Re:Pathetic

[sweatyboatman]

from your link

In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, but by 1993 the cost projection exceeded $12 billion.

When the project was canceled, 22.5 km (14.0 mi) of tunnel and 17 shafts to the surface were already dug, and nearly two billion dollars had already been spent on the massive facility.

You call $2 billion of a projected $12 billion, mostly paid-for?

I just want to say

[dsouza42]

Happy Groundhog's Day!

Re:TeV is not Trillion TeV is Tera

[Chris Burke]

Trillion is several orders of magnitude more

Not in American English it isn't... Terra = Trillion = 10^9.

Still doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This still doesn't make sense to me. Why not take the particles to a particle mechanic and strip them? Surely that would let us see the parts more clearly.

Seattle

[dgbrownnt]

I know it's all perfectly safe and all, but it is kinda nice that Seattle and Switzerland are across the world from each other.

Re:TeV is not Trillion TeV is Tera

[nacturation]

Terra = Firma. :)

Black Holes?

[DarthVain]

Was that with or without planet eating black holes? Because if the world isn't destroyed yet, it probably isn't working properly.