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CERN's LHC To Shut Down For Repair & Upgrades
hypnosec writes "CERN has revealed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going into hibernation and will be shut down for a period of two years for upgrades. The LHC will go through a maintenance and upgrade phase starting in March that will bring the atom smasher up to speed with its maximum energy levels. From the article: 'The machine that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson – or a convincing subatomic impostor – faces a two-year shutdown while engineers perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year.'"
Time to get the Black Hole Machine ready for 1.21 Jigawatts
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
With the resolution of the NHL strike, a lot of Zambonis and their skilled operators will be shipped over to North America and thus won't be available for the regular icedowns required by the LHC track.
Hmm... Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious. Either "those in the know" have to have some time to make sure things like the LHC don't really find it, or they need a little time to reengineer the Higgs so as to make it less detectable.
For how many years needs something to be known before it is no longer a revelation? Seriously, this schedule has been in the plans for several years, it was also clear from even before the initial start that before going to design luminosity (i.e. beam intensity in layman's speak) and design energy a shutdown for refurbishment would be necessary. This is no surprise at all -- after all running the world's highest energy particle collider (the LHC at 7 TeV) would necessarily teach us something about running a machine at even higher energies (the LHC which will run at 13-14 TeV starting 2014) that we didn't know before.
I gotta ask, what the heck is powering this thing? Several nuclear reactors? I think it's time we work on Fusion reactors if they're going to upgrade at this point.
Their plans to end the world have failed, so they're retooling with more power to try again!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To try and use the collider and have to peel the onion to deal with the unknowns. Then again, could be the Laundry at work.. ;)
there is little chance of a resonance cascade
Is there a way a 3D printer can speed that up? Or maybe we can put the LHC into a private space orbit and let the free market take over?
Yay! No black holes for the next two years!
Another upgrade, is this run by Microsoft?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Just a quick question. How can the particles that have been produced be turned off? Also where does SARAH fit into this "shutdown" I thought with ALICE they were to help the growing findings?
Thank You
The necessary data for determining whether there truly is a Higgs Boson or not is already there
Actually that is not quite correct. To really determine whether we have a Standard Model Higgs boson we need to see its decays into things called fermions (particles that make up matter) and so far we have only see it decay into bosons (particles that create forces). The problem is that the heaviest fermions the "Higgs" can create, b-quarks, are also created by different physics that is ~a billion times more likely than a Higgs decay so it's like try to find a piece of straw in a haystack (a needle is easy if you have a big enough magnet!). The next heaviest fermions, tau leptons - a very heavy cousin of the electron - decay in a way which makes them look very much like quarks and so, to a large degree, suffer the same problem (identifying taus in the trigger is something I actually work on).
So to be able to see these decays we need a lot of data and it is not entirely clear whether we will have enough in the current dataset to see these decays - my best guess is that we might hit 3 sigma "evidence" but without some very clever analysis I think a 5 sigma "discovery" is unlikely. In addition we also need to measure the spin of the Higgs to confirm that it is a scalar, spin-0, particle. This again requires large statistics and again I don't know that we have enough data yet - time will tell.
The big reason for the shutdown is for the energy upgrade. If this new particle really is the Higgs then we can expect new physics out there to explain why the Higgs is so much lighter than the planck scale - the energy where gravity becomes important (the reasons behind this are complex!). This new physics may also explain what Dark Matter is so there is a great deal of hope that getting the energy up to ~13TeV (which is what is expected after the upgrade) may give us access to this new physics.
Time to get the Black Hole Machine ready for 1.21 Jigawatts
Not far off - but the LHC power consumption is only ~0.3 GW and won't change much with the higher energy since the magnets are superconducting and most of the power goes into keeping them cold. However with a 27km circumference don't expect to find it mounted in the back of a Delorean anytime soon.
No grandpa, it's a sub-atomic particle smasher.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In two years from now when it is upgraded and running at maximum levels will anyone think to warn Gordan Freeman??? :)
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
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The LHC beam tunnel is just barely big enough for the beam line and magnets. The layout is as tight as a submarine. Getting magnets in and out is a huge pain. The original intent was that it wasn't going to be necessary to do that very often. It didn't work out that way.
But after the last failure, they discovered that the electrical connections between the sections weren't as solid as they needed to be. The trouble four years ago happened because a weld wasn't good enough. A connection went non-superconducting and became resistive, and all the energy stored in the associated superconducting magnets was converted to heat. The area of the joint exploded and most of the liquid helium in the system converted to gas, blowing out a lot of cryogenic plumbing.
Because of the tight spaces, tasks which ought to be done in parallel have to be done sequentially. That increases downtime.
The unfinished US Superconducting Supercollider had tunnels big enough for railroad trains. (It was in Texas and a pork program; what would you expect?) CERN built cheaper, but they pay for it in downtime.
damn it.. where is all the anti-matter? without it how can I ever control the universe??
> CERN has revealed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going into hibernation and will be shut down for a period of two years for upgrades.
Clearly they have discovered a network of interstellar wormholes and are are trying to hush it up while assembling a team of space commandos a la Richard Dean Anderson.
Slashdot: Embellished news for nerds.
All the best science is done by the US. We invented technology - radios, cars, jet aircraft, rockets. Now you see what happens if we don't keep science in the USA, where it belongs...
Go back to watching FOX News, this is Slashdot.
I presume GP was joking, as none of the above were invented in the US.