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Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011
quaith writes "ScienceInsider reports that Europe's Large Hadron Collider will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. The previous plan was to ramp it up to 70% of maximum energy this year. Under the new plan, the LHC will run at 7 trillion electron-volts through 2011. The LHC would then shut down for a year so workers could replace all of its 10,000 interconnects with redesigned ones allowing the LHC to run at its full 14 TeV capacity in 2013. The change raises hopes at the LHC's lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year. Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass."
Does this news mean we now only have to be half afraid that they're going to create a black hole that will destroy the Earth?
Whatever happened to that bird who dropped a baguette into the reactor and caused a zillion dollars of damage?
garethw
at (apparently) no one being fired for designing interconnects that only allow the LHC to run at 1/2 power? I may not be a scientist, but shouldn't a design cover the requirements? Then, to lose a year's work on top of that, and no one is getting their wrist slapped or even sued?
Impetuous! Homeric!
7 TeV is still more than 3 times Fermilab's total collision energy.
This more conservative ramp up is probably smart given the previous problems with equipment failure on the LHC. This will allow the systems to be tested thoroughly before going to max capacity.
I'm scared for all the half-lives at risk.
But what about all the counter-strikes and the portals?
This would actually be a good idea. Kind of like how Jobs and Wozniak made the original Apple computer cost $666. Fuck the fundie psychos!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
7 TeV?
I'll tell that to my mom, who complains about the electricity bill for my computers :D
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
The Big Deal about the LHC isn't just the energy. It's also that it allows for a much higher collision rate than the Tevatron. Even if you only run the thing at Tevatron energies, it's possible that it can collect as much data in a week as the Tevatron could in years.
When the LHC guys down the hall show up tomorrow I'll have to ask them about the planned luminosity in the first year of running.
Uh, HEL-LO?!! Have you guys forgotten that the world is going to end in 2012?!! I think you might want to ramp it up all the way in 2011...just in case.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Well, since you ask, potential future applications include tractor beams and antigravity. Theoretically.
in 2012 a mess up a Fermilab will let the cubs win!
Maybe they can claim that it has to do something with global warming and the giant sound of sucking machines, and micro-black holes will start getting the money for them.
Om, nomnomnom...
And hyperdrive.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Pardon me for my ignorance. What I don't understand is: do none of these problems show up when a short segment of the ring is built and operated at somewhat above its target power? I get the impression that the failures are in magnetic focusing components rather than the beam. Is that not correct?
Bruce Perens.
It certainly would have been possible to design them with a higher safety factor, but that would have increased the cost...Unfortunately for a large cutting edge project on a tight budget, you need to take some technical risks.
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
ApostleCorp.
New Economic Perspectives
Guess probably they figure out that they can no longer able to pay the electricity bills by running at max energy.
New Economic Perspectives
If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
Without even counting that running it will stress some other hardware and uncover some other potential problems.
It brings all the boys to your yard...
Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it.
Well, no. It sounds like they're quite concerned about doing something useful after spending those billions of euros. They still have the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth by a good margin, even if it's not up to its full design power (yet). They can do some solid science, good experiments, collect a year's worth of data and test all of their detectors and other hardware.
After that, they'll have a year with the beam turned off, in which they can actually analyze the mountains of data that were generated during a year of experimental runs. In addition to replacing the magnet interconnects, experimenters will have a year to fix any problems that come to light with detectors and other experiment hardware and software. This period of operation means that there shouldn't be any unpleasasnt surprises when they do go to full power, because they'll have had a year of 7 TeV operation to shake out all the bugs.
~Idarubicin
In an equally optimistic point of view, if Higgs boson is later shown to not exist, the Tevatron Collider can claim that it was able to not find it before the LHC!
Fellow Slashdotters, I hope is becoming abundantly clear by now that an age is ending; the great 20th century scientific projects are fading into history, and the 21st century will require us to dramatically lower our expectations for scientific civilization. What exactly is the payoff for the LHC anyway? In what way does it inspire society at large or contribute anything useful? It’s very strange to be living through the collapse of your own civilization, but with each passing day it becomes more and more clear to me that that’s what is happening. It looks to me like our resources are going to be funneled increasingly toward the military as we struggle to maintain what we already have, instead of pursuing inspirational projects that ordinary people can understand. A sad time to be alive for those of us who grew up with bigger dreams, but maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
As a professional electronics engineer, my assessment is that there is no PROPER way to build a 14 TeV particle accelerator. Point me to the application note for it if I happened to overlook it.
Seems to me like the 2012 fuss played a bit of a role in this decision. Last I remember, they were meant to do this upgrade/maintenance during late 2010-2011, which meant it would have been functional in 2012.
But then again, they have more reasons to be over-cautious considering LHC's history. Only if the scientists operating it were a bit younger dare devils, ahem ahem.
Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass
Why don't they work together? Seems awfully inefficient not to share data, which this appears to imply.
and only dropped half
From New Scientist:
In everyday terms, this energy isn't so great – a flying mosquito has about 1 TeV of kinetic energy. What makes the LHC so special is that this energy is concentrated in a region a thousand billion times smaller than a speck of dust.
... I'll remember that next time I squat a mosquito!
---
LHC Feed @ Feed Distiller
Most mythologies? Can you list them? I thought that only some mythologies even included an end-of-the-world scenario, and of those, almost all are wise enough not to give a date. So I'm puzzled by this claim. Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
I'm personally not aware of any mythologies which state that the world will end in 2012, only of a calendar which resets.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... for sciences that are of more immediate benefit. I have nothing against blue sky research in particle physics but in general its a fairly esoteric area of research that produces little of value that trickles back to mankind as a whole. I'm really not convinced this level of funding should be spent on it when other areas of science and technology struggle to get ANY sort of funding. I believe that research budgets should be based on the potential value of any results that may crop up and nice it may well be to find the Higgs Boson from an academic point of view, how exactly will it benefit mankind compared to curing cancer , AIDS, designing new fuel efficient engines for example?
If the people running these experiments want this sort of budget then raise it privately (good luck!) , but don't expect taxpayers to fork out for it to this level. A tens of million dollars/euros fine , but 5.5 BILLION? Pu-lease...
Nice to see that when something goes wrong, it becomes 'Europe's' LHC. I thought CERN was an international thing.
I think it reasonable to expect taxpayers to get something back from it
You mean like the computer you wrote your post on? The medicine that has roughly doubled life expectancy in the developed world in the past few hundred years or so? What you seem to be advocating is akin to the recent UK government plans to assess potential economic benefits of research before granting funding which has met with considerable opposition. Private enterprise is certainly well-equipped enough to make a profit for the economy by applying the findings of fundamental research. Take the iPod for example. This needed research into materials, solid state physics, batteries etc, much of which would have been done at a government subsidised university/insitution. Private enterprise stands on the shoulders of giants and provides the economic benefit that easily justifies subsidising pure research.
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
-George Washington (address to Congress, 8 January, 1790)
I used to work on the software handling the test results from hardware commissioning of the LHC, and an inevitable conclusion is that a lot of smart people did a lot of work to get the accelerator working as well as it does, given the restrictions and unknowns of the project.
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/09/terrible-news-gordon-freeman-spotted-near-large-hadron-collider/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My guess is they won't be ready to run at 100% power until December 21, 2012.
"You remind me of the kid at school who would ask what relevance every single thing they were being taught would have in a work place."
If you're going to be patronising you might try and get the point first.
"You mean like the computer you wrote your post on?"
Funny you should mention that - Babbage was given government money specifically to build a machine to calculate log tables amongst other things that could be used by the navy. When he failed to produce funding was withdrawn. Electronic computers came about mainly due to the efforts against the nazis in WW2.
"The medicine that has roughly doubled life expectancy in the developed world in the past few hundred years or so?"
Big pharm spends money on drugs it'll get a return on. It doesn't do it just for the hell of it.
So thats 2 of your arguments shot out the water.
I have nothing against pure research , but there you can't just hand out a blank cheques otherwise you might as well just fund any old artist who promises that one day he might surpass Rembrant.
The medicine that has roughly doubled life expectancy in the developed world in the past few hundred years or so?
The LHC is the Duke Nukem of high-energy physics.
> spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent,
> flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it
Which is EXACTLY what happened to the Concordski.
> doing something useful
Define "useful"?
In my mind, proving some esoteric point that we already know is both (a) considered to be well understood already, and (b) known to tell us nothing about the real universe, does not really equate to "useful".
Those untold billions would buy a WHOLE LOT of REALLY GOOD telescopes, which will generate orders of magnitude more knowledge. Better yet, the public loves telescopes, especially their pretty pictures.
Maury
While it's a shame that all the money put in so far hasn't quite led to the promised results, it doesn't matter. It's sciency, and it's worth it at any price.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
So, how much will it cost to make me a collider that goes to 14?