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CERN Releases LHC Data
An anonymous reader writes: Ever wished you had access to CERN's LHC data to help with your backyard high-energy physics research? Today you're in luck. CERN has launched its Open Data Portal, which makes experimental data produced by the Large Hadron Collider open to the public. "The first high-level and analyzable collision data openly released come from the CMS experiment and were originally collected in 2010 during the first LHC run. This data set is now publicly available on the CERN Open Data Portal. Open source software to read and analyze the data is also available, together with the corresponding documentation. The CMS collaboration is committed to releasing its data three years after collection, after they have been thoroughly studied by the collaboration." You can read more about CERN's commitment to "Open Science" here.
No. Even though it's called CERN. The research is very much sub-nuclear. And although the energies are higher, this also means the particles involved decay quickly. Similarly in nature, they're created with high energies, but don't last long. The A-bomb relies on the natural abundance of uranium or plutonium. These are unstable elements that can be triggered into decaying in a chain reaction. The particles at the LHC need a lot of energy to create, and they decay quickly. It's been suggested they could make an anti-matter bomb. You'd need to use a lot more energy making the anti-matter than would be released in the bomb. Anti-matter is hard to store: it will interact with any matter destructively. No one can make anti-matter in enough quantity. Even if they could, and despite the great energy efficiencies, plutonium and uranium is so much more practical, along with some fusion fuel, that the relatively low energy efficiencies of a nuclear bomb, isn't a problem.
Who ordered that?
What you are getting is the reconstructed data. To be able to do anything scientifically valuable with it you have to understand the intricate details of the reconstruction software, the trigger, the calibration etc. etc. To be honest I would be amazed if anyone outside CMS will be able to do much with it at all. I'd also expect that there will be bandwidth restrictions on accessing the data since the dataset is multi-PB (if it is the full set of run I data).
We did a similar exercise with the D0 experiment at Fermilab several years ago and it was of interest to practically nobody. I expect there may be somewhat more interest with this being the LHC data but I'd be surprised if anything useful comes of it given the massive amount of work required to be able to do a useful analysis. The best I can think of is that this might make a really nice undergraduate course project or, with some pre-written, high level analysis code, perhaps even as outreach for high school students.