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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."
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.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Hopefully they know how to conduct themselves this time around.
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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
now we could feed THAT into a flux capacitor.....
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?
I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the streams... It would be bad...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Later, Atomm was seen driving off in his SUV, looking smug that he had put those damned scientists in their place.
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.)
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?
www.eFax.com are spammers
7 trillion eV is really, really small.
That's actually eV/particle, so total energy depends on the number of particles at that energy.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Fermilab better send over another bird...
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.
... as a scientific tool, I'd say it has a lot of potential. Ba-dum-bump
The beams at the LHC go round and round, round and round, round and round.....
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
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 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?
there you go
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Hypatia... I don't think any of them claimed to know why.
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.
"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.
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?
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'