LHC Hits an Energy of 3.5TeV

Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."

Comments

The press release is one week old

[Bananenrepublik]

The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release

Re:The press release is one week old

[bucky0]

Also, IIRC the general director's first language isn't english, so I think the "pompous" the submitter saw was just stemming from that. From what I've heard, he's a nice guy.

Re:The press release is one week old

[kiehlster]

Actually, the press release came out today when they reach 3.5 TeV, which is when they actually breached the space-time continuum, thus sending their PR department back in time one week resulting in this back-dated press release.

Re:The press release is one week old

[MRe_nl]

That's not pompous, that's just German thoughts translated into English ;).

Re:The press release is one week old

[ceoyoyo]

The release wasn't pompous anyway. It was clear, outlined what their goals are and put their (nearly) current status in perspective.

Doesn't Slashdot have editors to turn crappy submissions into reasonable summaries?

All right, I just exceeded my sarcasm quota for the day in a single statement.

Not pompous,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty outrageous calling the Director General's web update pompous. Someone clearly has an axe to grind. His web page seemed like quite a reasonable summary for the time it was posted. Part of his job is to promote the value of the billions of Euros being spent on CERN.

Re:Not pompous,

[OzPeter]

It's pretty outrageous calling the Director General's web update pompous.

I'd say you were new around here (as kdawson is not known for his intellectual musings), but damn it Anonymous Coward, you've been posting here for longer than I have - so you should know better than to write crap like that.

Kdawson is the problem

[hexghost]

What I want to know is - when will kdawson not be such a tool?

Re:How many Libraries of Congress

[iprefermuffins]

Wait, are we talking TeV or TieV?

Re:Energetically Equivalent to...

[ceoyoyo]

Per particle.

The designed nominal total beam energy of the LHC is in the range of the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier travelling at a significant speed.

If both beams are 3.5 TeV

[Low Ranked Craig]

Does that make the collision 7 TeV? Serious question - I'm not sure I completely understand the physics. OK. I almost completely don't understand them. I have read that the LHC produced collisions of 14TeV, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV. If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit?

Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV

[Werthless5]

LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.

The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.

Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV

[Hurricane78]

If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world".

You are exactly right. And it’s the failure of every “expert” interviewed who didn’t mention this, and of course of the media hype machine, that that is not well known to everyone.
Oh, and of course mostly to the loonies who want to stay ignorant.

and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV.

To imagine this: Those particles are so fast that they have the mass of an apple or orange. A subatomic particle! This gives you some feeling for the power.
And yes, that does mean that they create those tiny black holes all the time in our atmosphere.
If this would create black holes, earth would have never existed.

Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV

[Clueless Moron]

It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.

Ah, but you forget that cosmics ray hadrons are natural and organically grown, unlike those nasty synthetic LHC ones which cause obesity, cancer and black holes. Plus they don't taste as good.

Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV

[amRadioHed]

I highly doubt you'd feel an impact with a single particle regardless of it's momentum. It would just blow right through you like an X-Ray or gamma ray without you knowing, but potentially damaging some DNA on its way.

Re:How many Libraries of Congress

[maxwell demon]

Of course the correct way to do it would be to multiply the information of the LoC with k*T ln 2 where k = Boltzmann constant, T = temperature of the Library, ln 2 to change from base 2 logarithm (information entropy) to natural logarithm (thermodynamic entropy).

Let's take the 20 million volumes * 200 pages from your calculation, and assume 250 words per page, 4.5 letters per word and 1.4 bits per letter (see directly above table 1, the value for longer text; I've taken the middle, rounded up). With this data, we get a total information content of the LoC of 6.3*10^12 bits. Let's further assume the temperature of LoC is about 290K, then we get the energy equivalent of the LoC as about 0.11 TeV.

Therefore 3.5 TeV is about 32 LoC.

Re:luminosity

[rminsk]

In past and present colliders the luminosity culminates around L = 10^32c^-2 s^-1, in the LHC it will reach L = 10^34cm^-2 s^-1. This will be achieved by filling each of the two rings with 2835 bunches of 10^11 particles each.

Re:Who cares?

[Steve Max]

Actually, this goes in steps. They went from ~1.18TeV (which was already the highest energy for a proton beam ever achieved in lab) to 3.5TeV. The experiments will run at 3.5TeV for some time, then another shutdown to get them to the design energy of 7TeV per beam (14 TeV per collision). All is happening as planned.

The "problems" you mention happened with every single collider, ever. When you get to a new scale, you expect things to happen differently from your original idea; so you plan to allow time to solve problems. The accelerator itself is an experiment, and one that is going very well.

You want hard results? ALICE published a science paper on collisions almost four months ago. You can see more from ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Lots of simulations, descriptions and detection methods, but at least the two "smaller" groups (LHCb and ALICE) have measurements already, at one sixth of the energy they were designed to work on. In fact, LHCb will only have actual b hadrons to see when they start colliding protons at 3.5TeV; but they still could find a meaningful result to publish, sooner than anticipated by anyone with even passing understanding of collider physics. Is that enough? Or do people actually believe things go like this?

LHC Webcam

[Temujin_12]

This is good news. Check out their webcam.