LHC Season 2 Is About To Start Testing the Frontiers of Physics

An anonymous reader writes: The final preparations for the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are in place. This week, it is expected to start taking new data with collisions at the record-breaking energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV). There are a lot of expectations about this new LHC season. In one of CERN's articles, physicists tell of their hopes for new discoveries during the LHC's second run. "They speak of dark matter,supersymmetry, the Higgs boson, antimatter, current theory in particle physics and its limits as well as new theoretical models that could extend it."

Comments

Re:watched a movie yesterday

[As_I_Please]

You're right: the LHC beams are made up of separate bunches of protons. These bunches only collide at the 4 detectors. If they collided anywhere else, there wouldn't be anything to detect the products of the collision, so that collision would be a waste. Until the collision in the detectors, the protons moving in opposite directions are kept in separate beam lines: http://lhc-machine-outreach.we.... Here's a look inside the beam pipe: http://lhc-machine-outreach.we...

The time between collisions is 25 nanoseconds, meaning there is 25 feet between each bunch (light travels at about 1 foot per nanosecond). When two bunches collide, there are only 20-30 proton-proton collisions because the protons are so small compared to the size of the bunches. By the time the next bunches arrive at the collision point, the debris from the first collisions are completely gone from the original collision point (about 25 feet away in all directions).

http://lhc-machine-outreach.we...