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

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

[Beelzebud]

Science isn't about instant gratification.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

If only....

[Metatron]

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

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]

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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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: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:Translation into sensible units

[Macrat]

How much is that in gigawatts?

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.

1.18 billion volts...

[ebursey]

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

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: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

[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: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.