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LHC Reaches Record Energy
toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"
Doom, I tell you. It's coming for all of us.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Is this related to the wormhole that opened up above Norway yesterday?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234430/Mystery-spiral-blue-light-display-hovers-Norway.html
http://angryhosting.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/92/92a406b3d33f96b6953bab7efdf4541c1f130c27.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/d0718b906d187ca53b2e5a919c0e50dc2bb920d2/Fenomen_over_Borras_340148c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/c3c879e75fc8f28b8867e8e678300ab6550dddfb/Fenomen_over_Borras_340149c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/37f2e96dcb20b8b968af81799df40f72a36e73e1/1260346061961_198.jpg
http://www.vgtv.no/?id=27553
http://img.waffleimages.com/294526ec517df78cb7535993b41d3cc0dafa0f05/DSC00020_340153b.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/1ff7bad9b6542532a8cdc63bf02b386f891861d0/8fb0b14e0b4c7123618a8783dc35c964.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/9094e12c8e6320a3238bbf7e833c3cf6e36ed3c3/Fenomen_over_Borras_340147c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/e07e495a8589dd769b7640ac21be295f738c1c04/f8ec04b52d3ffb2558f3256fd8f11d0a.jpg
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
So I says, "Super collider? I just met her!" And then they built the super collider. Thank you, you've been a great audience. - Humorbot 5.0
A greater understanding of physics may well be worth the excessive use of energy, as it may lead to better sources of energy tomorrow.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if Kurzweil is right, we'll hit the Singularity in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be solved.
The most optimistic scenario for Higgs discovery would take a few years of running. But there are plenty of other theories to test that can show their first signs already after a few months of running in physics configuration (7 TeV or 10 TeV energy that'll probably be around in January/February). Things like supersymmetry, lepton flavor violation etc.
A herd of Lamas have escaped a local zoo and nibbled on the Christmas lights at CERN. The short caused the cooling system to go off line and the LHC will be off line for five months.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... for certain values of "solved"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
You only need about 0.5mA to send a DeLorian back in time!
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Dammit Slashdot, at least learn to use Jiggawatts instead of TeV or whichever crazy measure Europeans have, don't forget about your American audience!
I've been following the LHC's progress fairly closely because I find the project absolutely fascinating. On the other hand, I think /. might be overdoing it a bit regarding news on the subject. Half the summary was devoted to explaining what exactly was different from the last posting. As all of the previous posting have explained, it will be a few months before anything truly exciting happens and years after that before the first really valuable scientific discoveries start occurring. Much of the discussion has become: "Are we there yet?" "No." "How about now?" "No." "And now?" "Still no."
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's called "minimizing downside risk".
Which is a fancy way of saying "well, and what if the Singularity does NOT occur on schedule?"
Personally, I don't think anyone is taking the whole "global warming" thing seriously yet - they're just posturing with another unenforceable (and largely meaningless) Treaty meant to placate the global warming lobby while otherwise doing not very much at all.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The amount of power they used in mere minutes during this experiment could have powered millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time.
About a minute worth of googling shows that the site draws a peak load of about 180 MW when it's running, of which about 120 MW is for the LHC itself. And it doesn't run all the time.
Typical homes are about 2 kW or so, give or take, so that's hardly enough to power "millions of homes and businesses".
Population of Europe is abour 830 million, by the way, so LHC represents approximately zero percent of the energy consumption of Europe (to two significant figures).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is factually incorrect. At peak (experiment running, all detectors running, all computers processing), the LHC will consume 180 MW of energy. This includes all the energy used to heat offices, etc... The actual experiment uses ~22MW of power. It's not "sneeze-at" power consumption, but considering an average household uses ~1kW of power, and the fact the LHC is planned on being shutdown a significant fraction of the year, the assertion that you could power "millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time" is bogus.
-Bucky
The reason to collide particles coming in from opposite directions is from kinematics. If you shoot a 1 TeV beam at a fixed target you only get roughly 50 or GeV as the center of mass energy (if I remember right it's ca sqrt(2*m_proton*1000)). That square root is a bitch there. If you shoot them head on to each other at equal energy, then you have the full energy at your disposal. Any other configuration will only reduce the effective energy. If I remember right the LHC dipole magnets are created in such a way that they automatically accelerate particles in parallel beamlines in opposite directions if the particles are of the same charge so it's a nice feat allowing for best efficiency. However you have to understand that the particles are effectively for your local observation traveling at the speed of light. They make ca 11500 circuits every second and you have to keep them in orbit. At the same time the bunch is made up of same charge particles that all want to get away from each other. So the technical difficulty is controlling the magnets in sync with the beams to keep them going and if you have two beams going in opposite directions it just become tougher. Hence the slow testing in baby steps (though they are in general huge steps I'd say). In general I hope some accelerator engineer can chime in and explain the precise background.
The LHC uses 120MW, but if you really want to slant the numbers in your favor we can go with the 180MW consumed by the entire CERN complex.
If you wanted to power millions (we'll say 2M, since that's the lowest number that can be called "millions") of homes and businesses, you could only give each one 90W. My modest-sized, well-insulated, gas-heated, largely-flourescent-lighted house consumes roughly 1kW (1000W).
So now that we have the hyperbole out of the way, certainly LHC consumes a lot of power. If you hadn't been greedy, you could've said "could power thousands of homes and businesses" (and left off the assertion that there was some time multiplier involved), and that's true.
However, willingness to spend energy on physics is only in conflict with wanting to conserve energy if either (1) the value of the physics fails to outweigh the value of the power consumed, or (2) there is a more energy-efficient way to do the physics.
Perhaps you think the physics isn't worth doing; those funding it disagree. That does not make them hypocrits.
If you have a more efficient design for the LHC, I'm sure many people would love to see it.
Oh, and there's only one LHC whereas there are millions of homes, millions of vehicles, millions of offices in the world. In other words, millions of opportunities to make incremental energy improvemnts that would cumulatively offset far more power than all of the particle accelerators in the world consume, without the need to sacrifice scientific progress (or much of anything, really).
... LHC also broke the record for working for the longest uninterrupted time.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.
Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV
640GeV ought to be enough for anybody.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
in standard media units
- Two female mosquitos colliding at 1.652 km/h? http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/lhc_glossary.htm
- An unladen African swallow falling off a grain of sand?
- The calorific value of 1 cornflake unleashed over the space of a fortnight?
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
did you mean llama?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama
or perhaps lamia, a child-eating female demon? that would be sexy but would certainly mess up cern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(mythology)
they were attacked by hawaiian trees?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diospyros_sandwicensis
they were attacked by a ukranian pop band?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(band)
ohhh, you meant tibetan religious leaders! why won't those damn buddhist fundamentalists leave science alone!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama
unfortunately, they may know lama, so they'll certainly kick your ass after knocking out cern with a tibetan white crane style kick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(martial_art)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's right, Citizen, don't worry about your problems. Just go be a good consumer and enjoy life; everything will be taken care of for you by the Great Tin God. As if by magic Technology will sweep in and save the day, with no need for you to change or contribute in any way.
Oh, and don't worry; mere mortals cannot dig a hole so deep that Technology can't solve it. You can't do so much damage in the next 20 or 30 years, give or take, to face catastrophy before the coming of the Great Tin God. Your folly certainly can't interfere with His coming - and have faith, He is coming!
Give. Me. A. Break.
If not for humans striving to solve significant problems, there would be no technological advancement, and any Singularity that we might imagine coming would never be. That's if the whole Singularity idea isn't crap to start with (of which I am not convinced).
Perhaps an aphorism will help: Have faith, but row toward shore.
The LHC becomes the first particle accelerator to collide protons at energies twice the speed of the tevatron!
Please explain the Google service or iPhone tie-in.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
To accelerate particles in opposite directions using the same magnetic field, you'd need to accelerate both positive and negative charged particles (positives go one way, negatives go the other), The Tevatron does this (protons one way, antiprotons the other). You only have to build one ring to contain the particles, but it's a tradeoff because you have to generate the anti-particles, which is an expensive process (basically, take regular particles, slam them into a fixed target and you get some % out the other side as antiparticles.).
-Bucky
http://gfx.nrk.no/YOYD2X1CgNBSeaPse9LjVwT6ymkkphv7Q7x0aibAWJwg.jpg
as evidenced by the trail from over the horizon. Note the wind shear... Sorry, Russia. Denial denied!
...Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies....
That is completely and utterly false. Most plants, including most crops grow better when it's warmer and moister. If every last bit of ice on earth melted, it might raise the ocean level a few feet, but there would be vast areas of earth that would then be agriculturally productive, whereas now they are frozen wasteland or desert. Greenland would be once again a green land, covered with forests similar to what is on the east coast of North America today.
If such warming did happen, which the data in the last 10 years refutes, it would be generally good for humanity as a whole. This is especially true if the warming happened over a century or more, so that coastal areas and others could adapt.
It is nonsensical how almost everybody automatically assumes that global warming, even if it were happening, is universally bad. There are very few things on this earth that are either all good or all bad, but it is always a mixture of the two.
All theory is gray
..or so the theory goes. Norway's largest newspapers all did stories on this earlier today. Here is from one of them: Vg.no, and here is another dagbladet.no.
The first image from vg is taken with a long shutter time (or long exposure, or what the english expression is) on a tripod.
americans might consider these newspapers NSFW. Most norwegian ads contain a fair amount of tits and ass. just sayin'.
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
Someone goes to all the effort to make a perfectly reasonable Back to the Future joke and you have to kill it with your infernal logic. Great Scott, how dare you! This is so heavy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"You guys aren't comparing apples to apples "
Wrong. Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame.
"141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC"
Very similar to the result I posted, which should have tipped you off that your numbers are no better than mine. You used different estimates given in different units, but otherwise you're merely repeating the calcualtion that a number of us already did.
The reason the numbers are slightly different (you actually estimated slightly less homes than I did, btw) is that I used different starting estimaets and rounded a bit more. Why did I do this? Because it was sufficient to disprove the original claim of 'millions of homes and businesses' and was a lot less work.
In other words, you spent more effort to reach the same conclusion. In a discussion on efficiency. And then had the balls to claim the rest of us were doing it wrong.
"during a regular usage month"
And here you are factually wrong. Those estimates were for a peak utilization month.
Thanks! I've got 40K in student loads and 1K on my credit card and 300K in mortgage on my home (which is now worth half that).
So if you want me to send you -341K dollars, I'll be happy to obligue. :-)
The summary makes it sound like there's some immense wall that must be climed or broken in order to pass 1 TeV. There is no barrier at 1 TeV, but rather an arbitrary threshold put there by humans because the numeric representation of that energy level has a lot of zeros in the scale we happen to use. LHC did not pass a barrier, but a threshold.
This is science, and important science, so it's critical to get it right. Especially so for the non-scientific public.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
What makes you think that increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification? Increased evaporation of water isn't going to change the lack of regular pressure changes over the equator that could cause more regular rainfall. What it is far more likely to do is cause heavier intermittent storm rain, of the type that overwhelms the land's ability to retain water and mostly just flows away. Colder regions nearer the poles may gain in agricultural productivity, but at the cost of farmland nearer the equator, and the equator covers far more land area.
You might also want to look up ocean acidification by increased uptake of CO2, which is causing loss of coral reefs and threatening stability of fish as a food source.
Yes, your adam's-apple will swell up like a pregnant camel. Stock up on soup.
Table-ized A.I.
Webcam from the LHC is here
Open Source Alternatives
...increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification?....
Because a warmer atmosphere will hold a LOT more water which then can precipitate out in places that get little or no rain today. Warmer, moist air also distributes temperature variations more efficiency because it holds more heat. This means that rather than more violent weather, the weather will calm down because there is less difference between the hot places and the cool places on earth. This applies vertically in the atmosphere as well, reducing the temperature differences that drive violent storms such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
When the fossil fuels were formed, the earth was uniformly tropical and life was much more prolific because of that.
(...farmland nearer the equator, and the equator covers far more land area...)
Maybe that is true of farmland, but not land as a whole. The vast areas of northern Russia and China as well as northern Canada would once again be usable by humans. This tremendous increase in usable land area would far outstrip a possible small loss of land in coastal areas. There is also evidence that the areas now known as continental shelves were once free of water. A warmer atmosphere, say 10 C. warmer on the entire earth would hold a tremendous amount of water in suspension. Water vapor is lighter than either oxygen or nitrogen. This means that pure water vapor could accumulate above the oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. Water vapor is orders of magnitude more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
All that presupposes that global warming is actually taking place. In the last 10 years at least, there has been no evidence of this. That is why, in one of the hacked e-mails, one of the so-called global warming scientists called it a "travesty" that the data doesn't support their foregone conclusions.
All theory is gray
Since I happen to think nuclear fission is our best bet, that wouldn't bother me.
On that subject, I noticed in the news today that Taiwan now has a birthrate of 1.0 babies per woman. Which is about 1.2 babies per woman below replacement rate....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...*IF* you have serious data for this I'll believe it.....
Is oil in Alaska and coal in Antarctica good enough? These are fossil fuels produced by dead plants and animals. All fossil fuels represent carbon that was once were? Oh yeah, in the atmosphere were plants and sunshine could turn them into hydrocarbons which we now burn in our SUVs.
(...More hurricanes is the problem,...)
All weather on earth, including hurricanes, tornadoes and nasty blizzards, such as the Midwest is experiencing as I write this, are the result of temperature DIFFERENCES both vertically and horizontally in the atmosphere. If it were true that the earth is getting warmer overall, these differences would be reduced, because the atmosphere would hold more water and carry more heat that would be distributed more evenly. It is just too bad, that the wishful thinking of climate scientists is not happening. It would be rather nice to have a more uniformly warm earth. It would mean we would burn fewer fossil fuels to heat our houses. The vast iced over land areas of Siberia, northern Canada and Greenland would be habitable.
All theory is gray