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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."
Hopefully they know how to conduct themselves this time around.
Science isn't about instant gratification.
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.
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
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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
That's self gratification, not instant gratification. Although I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that last part...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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?