Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

LHC To Idle All Accelerators In 2012

Posted by Soulskill on from the there-goes-that-prophecy dept.

sciencehabit writes "Particle physicists and science fans everywhere knew that the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, would shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest atom smasher, for all of 2012 for repairs. Many expected that the shutdown would stretch to more than a year, which CERN officials confirmed today. But most probably did not expect CERN to idle all its other accelerators at the same time, shutting down a variety of smaller projects and forcing hundreds of scientists not working on the LHC to take an unanticipated break in data taking. The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, if researchers there can persuade lab management to keep the machine going instead of shutting it down in 2011 as currently planned." Reader suraj.sun notes other CERN news making the rounds right now about plans for the International Linear Collider, a 31-kilometer-long collider designed to complement the LHC. Construction on the ILC could begin as soon as 2012.

25 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Relief... by mconeone · · Score: 4, Funny

    I guess we won't have to worry about 12-21-2012 after all.

    1. Re:Relief... by starglider29a · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's a self-UN-fulfilling prophecy... just like when computer makers began rounding up to 667MHz processors. Apparently, 66Mhz, 266MHz, 466MHz needed to be rounded down, but they had to round up 666.

    2. Re:Relief... by localman57 · · Score: 4, Funny

      In the 80's we bought a PCjr. Does that count?

    3. Re:Relief... by Torodung · · Score: 3, Funny

      No! That's exactly what the Mayans would have us believe, from their time traveling relative dimension pocket near the Andromeda galaxy. The only way to prevent the catastrophic end of the B'ak'tun is to RUN the Large Hadron Collider and create a Higgs Boson that will counteract all the neutrino emissions from the sun.

      For the love of god, we must run the LHC or we may yet pass through the CGI event horizon, our imaginations running wild, causing the ruination of all the good creatures and the ultimate victory of the Woodland Critters!

      (Oof. Perhaps I shouldn't have watched the John Cusack 2012 movie and South Park back to back on Netflix last night?)

      --
      Toro

  2. This is how it'll happen by easterberry · · Score: 5, Funny

    "we're supposed to shut it down for maintenance"
    "No! This is our only chance to beat CERN! While they're still doing repairs!
    "You have to stop, the numbers! They're not stable!"
    "Almost there... almost there..."
    "GORDON! GET OUT OF THERE!"
    *green electrical storm*
    "My god... I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one!"

    and that's it people. We sent the crowbar to CERN. We're doomed.

    1. Re:This is how it'll happen by Luckyo · · Score: 2, Funny

      Sell the idea to Valve. I mean it.

  3. DAMNIT!!! by SpongeBob+Hitler · · Score: 2, Funny

    And here I was hoping they would end the world!

    --
    Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?
  4. Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by jaymz2k4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It might be essential but it saddens me a bit how much of a let down the LHC has been. Fermliab however has been a real story of inspiration. I hope we see results from Geneva in the future but so far it's not exactly been inspiring stuff and this decision to shut down everything sounds a bit OTT.

    --
    jaymz
    1. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by localman57 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah. The news is all like: "Hey, did you hear about the new collider? It's like the largest ever and stuff." "Really? Does it work?" "No, but if it did, I bet it'd be really cool."

    2. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by bucky0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You're comparing apples and oranges. All of these big experiments have things they need to get to get worked out before they're running at their design strength. That's the problem with building machines that are their own prototypes.

      I can't speak for all of them, but the detector I work on has been performing excellently (all its detector subsystems, etc..). There was a flaw in some of the accelerator magnets of the main LHC ring, and it needs to be fixed, which involves warming up and cooling down the magnets (which takes 3 months each eway)

      Fermilab, by comparison has been running for something like 20 years, they did their shakedown phase a long time ago, and now they're tuned to run optimally. It's the lifecycle of these things.

      --

      -Bucky
    3. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by Facegarden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're comparing apples and oranges. All of these big experiments have things they need to get to get worked out before they're running at their design strength. That's the problem with building machines that are their own prototypes.

      I can't speak for all of them, but the detector I work on has been performing excellently (all its detector subsystems, etc..). There was a flaw in some of the accelerator magnets of the main LHC ring, and it needs to be fixed, which involves warming up and cooling down the magnets (which takes 3 months each eway)

      Fermilab, by comparison has been running for something like 20 years, they did their shakedown phase a long time ago, and now they're tuned to run optimally. It's the lifecycle of these things.

      You're totally right, but I wish the planners took that kind of thinking into account. They all said this would be up and running 5 years ago, for much less cost than it has accrued.

      http://public.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases1996/PR09.96ECouncil96.html

      That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic? Right now you're saying "look, these things happen," but before they said "these things won't happen." At least, i feel like thats how it goes. I haven't been too involved so someone let me know if I'm wrong.

      I guess the politicians are weary enough and these things are hard to get funding for, so people want to over promise a bit, but it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

      Personally i think this stuff is worth way more money than wars and bailouts and whatnot, so I'm not complaining about the funding, i just think that these things constantly going over budget is the whole reason politicians are reluctant to buy in in the first place!
      -Taylor

      --
      Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
    4. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by localman57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That was from 1996, so I understand this stuff changes, but it *always* goes over time and over budget. Can't the planners be a bit more realistic?

      The planners who give realistic budgets never get their project built. The money ends up going to the guy who gave an unrealistic budget, an the illusion of a much better value.

    5. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      It might be essential but it saddens me a bit how much of a let down the LHC has been. Fermliab however has been a real story of inspiration. I hope we see results from Geneva in the future but so far it's not exactly been inspiring stuff and this decision to shut down everything sounds a bit OTT.

      The LHC has beaten the Tevatron for the record of highest energy collision which was around 1 TeV, and they've since completed collisions at 3.5 TeV. True, that's half the planned capability of 7 TeV and they're way behind the original timeline, but the LHC has already broken new ground. Before they shut down they hope to have a decent amount of 3.5 TeV data, then fix shit and still hit their target. I wish all my failures were that good, particularly if I was doing bleeding-edge science no one has done before. I did remember a story about one of the scientists working on that Mars probe that crashed due to the feet/meter thing, she'd been working on it for 7 years which went up in a ball of fire. Now that's failure.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    6. Re:Not sure what to make of the LHC so far by ozbird · · Score: 4, Informative

      You're off by a factor of 2. The individual beams are currently running at 3.5 TeV; the collisions are at 7 TeV. The goal is to ramp up to 7 TeV beams for 14 TeV collisions.

  5. Refractory Period by boneclinkz · · Score: 5, Funny

    Even the largest hadrons can't stay active forever.

  6. Getting tired.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    of reading about LHC repairs. Just create the damn black hole

  7. Bad headline by jfoobaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's wrong, and it's even contradicted by the summary below. The LHC isn't idling all accelerators, CERN is idling all of the accelerators they operate.

    I know it's Slashdot, but is it too much to ask that the editors try to pay enough attention to ensure that the headline is accurate with respect to the summary?

  8. Too Late for Tevatron by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Informative

    The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

    There are not many channels in which the Tevatron will be competitive with the LHC after the first data run assuming that we get the expected amount of data. The only advantages which the Tevatron has are a far better understood detectors and a larger luminosity sample but the first is lost with time (as ATLAS/CMS analyse and understand their detector data better) and the second is hard to significantly improve on given their already large data sample. The far higher energy of the LHC means that once the first data run is collected it will be very hard for the Tevatron to continue to compete with new physics. To give you an idea of the advantage a higher energy gives simply increasing the Tevatron energy from 1.8 TeV to 1.96 TeV (i.e. 10%) increased the number of top quark pairs produced by ~40%. The LHC energy is 350% that of the Tevatron so it is hard to see how they will be competitive with typical new, high energy phenomena after the first LHC run.

    1. Re:Too Late for Tevatron by bucky0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      To add to the parent, there's so many top quarks (something that's pretty rare, even on the tevatron), that we're planning on subtracting it out as a background for other events (tops share some decay channels with other, more interesting particles)

      --

      -Bucky
  9. Re:2012 by localman57 · · Score: 4, Funny
    I think so Brain,

    But how will we shrink the Earth to an object the size of a pea on December 21, 2012?

    Narf!

    FTFY.

  10. No they won't stay idle for long by TheHawke · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They'll delve into the masses of data accumulated over the years, peering at impact traces, peeling back gig after gig of data in search for that miracle that would flip the universe as we know it upside down...

    --
    First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
  11. ILC by PiMuNu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I really hope the ILC gets the go ahead But you would not build it until you know the Higgs mass (if the Higgs exists) because you want to work with e+e- collisions on the centre of mass. Until you can prove the Higgs mass is in the design range of the machine, you simply wouldn't built. So I think that story is yarbles.

  12. Re:kraft dinner by mea37 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    wonder how many boxes of Kraft dinner i could buy with the money they spend on any TWO of the various r&d efforts over the centuries that led to a world in which it's possible for me to cheaply buy a box of Kraft dinner

  13. Re:kraft dinner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I work on the LHC, and if its pinnacle of achievement, its major contribution to the progress of humanity, turns out to be cheaper Kraft dinners, I think I'm going to go lie under a bus.

  14. It's all falling into place by Torodung · · Score: 2, Funny

    OMG. Here is confirmable data, streaming in newsfeeds from all over the world, that the LHC is actually involved in a time travel paradox with a Higgs boson it can never create. Eventually the entire site will be nuked from orbit by the Higgs boson, because it's the only way to be sure.

    --
    Toro