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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."

12 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. The press release is one week old by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:The press release is one week old by bucky0 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      -Bucky
    2. Re:The press release is one week old by kiehlster · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:The press release is one week old by MRe_nl · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
  2. Not pompous, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Kdawson is the problem by hexghost · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. Re:How many Libraries of Congress by iprefermuffins · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait, are we talking TeV or TieV?

  5. Re:Energetically Equivalent to... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. If both beams are 3.5 TeV by Low+Ranked+Craig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
    1. Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV by Werthless5 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:If both beams are 3.5 TeV by Clueless+Moron · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

  7. Re:How many Libraries of Congress by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.