The Large Hadron Collider

[Gfunk]

I think this deserves it\'s own thread.

Sept launch for bid to crack secrets of universe :wah:Thu Aug 7, 1:08 PM ET
 


GENEVA (Reuters) - The world\'s most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Thursday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), housed in an underground tunnel 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference, will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang which many scientists believe gave birth to the universe.

It will seek to collide two beams of particles at close to the speed of light.

"The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on September 10," the Geneva-based CERN said in a statement.

The LHC will study a new frontier of physics, producing beams with seven times more energy than any previous machine.

But starting it up is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Each of its eight sectors must be cooled to their operating temperature of minus 271 degrees Celsius (minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit), colder than outer space. This phase is reaching a successful conclusion but electrical testing must follow.

"We\'re finishing a marathon with a sprint," said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. "It\'s been a long haul and we\'re all eager to get the LHC research program underway."

Scientists hope the experiment will help explain fundamental questions such as how particles acquire mass. They will also probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe and investigate why there is more matter than antimatter.

Some 10,000 scientists from around the world have worked on the complex 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.5 billion) apparatus since construction began in 1994, a spokesman said.

(reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Jonathan Lynn and William Schomberg)

Official press release:

CERN announces start-up date for LHC
 
The CERN Control Center, from where the LHC will be operated.
Geneva, 7 August 2008. CERN1 has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of the start-up will be made available through Eurovision.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.

Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine.

By the end of July, this work was approaching completion, with all eight sectors at their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). The next phase in the process is synchronization of the LHC with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC’s injector chain. Timing between the two machines has to be accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond. A first synchronization test is scheduled for the weekend of 9 August, for the clockwise-circulating LHC beam, with the second to follow over the coming weeks. Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for 2008. Force majeure notwithstanding, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).

Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier.

‘We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,’ said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. ‘It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.’

CERN will be issuing regular status updates between now and first collisions. Journalists wishing to attend CERN for the first beam on 10 September must be accredited with the CERN press office. Since capacity is limited, priority will be given to news media. The event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. Live stand up and playout facilities will also be available.

A media centre will be established at the main CERN site, with access to the control centres for the accelerator and experiments limited and allocated on a first come first served basis. This includes camera positions at the CERN Control Centre, from where the LHC is run. Only television media will be able to access the CERN Control Centre. No underground access will be possible.

For further information and accreditation procedures: http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam
1 CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world\'s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

sweet pics here http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

What happens if they do create the same circumstances as the big bang and they create a new universe in that tunnel? Shit is ca-razy!

[peaches626]

ya i read about this a while ago.... i thought i might have started a thread about it?  i\'m a little nervous they might blow up the world by accident, but i heard the chances of anything crazy happening are pretty much non existent...

[Gfunk]

did you check out those pictures? they are pretty mind blowing. I tried to post a few but it wasn\'t allowing me to for some reason.

[FrankZappa]

seeing how it took billions of years for the universe to grow, I think we\'ll be safe for a little while.

When they first tested the atomic bomb they were afraid that they might crack the crust of the earth and destroy the planet. THey were also afraid it might blow the atmosphere off of the planet causing everyone everywhere to suffocate instantly but they still went forward with those experiments also, so why would this scare them?

[SlimPickens]

Hadrons that last more then 9 hours should consult their physician.

[FrankZappa]

:rolleyes:

[SlimPickens]

:rolleyes:

didn\'t work?  had ta try, it was out there for the taking.

[Drew_Kingsley]

Hadrons that last more then 9 hours should consult their physician.

Cleverest. Post. Ever.

As a side note, I was shocked to learn that "cleverest" is a word. Grammar are awesome.

[FrankZappa]

came online this morning! woOt!

10 September: the LHC’s first circulating beam
05/09/2008.
On 10 September, a first beam of protons will circulate in the LHC. The first moments in the life of the LHC will be an exciting time for the CERN staff, and will be captured by more than 250 media organizations from all over the world.

The first injection of the beam into the machine will be between 9:00 and 10:00 a. m. At 9:15 the LHC project leader, Lyn Evans, will give a brief explanation of the day’s proceedings in French followed by some words from Robert Aymar, CERN Director general.

CERN personnel are invited to follow the first beam day events, which will be shown in the following rooms around CERN:

All day:
Council Chamber, Main Auditorium, IT Auditorium, AB Auditorium Prévessin, Conference Room 40-S2-A01, Conference Room 40-S2-C01.

Afternoon:
AB Auditorium Meyrin, AT Auditorium.

Please note that the event will also be webcast but, given the limited number of connections, this option is intended for use of the public outside CERN. CERN personnel are encouraged to follow the event from the conference rooms.
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/popup?name=CERNBulletin&type=breaking_news&record=1124329&ln=en

[FrankZappa]

Three decades after it was conceived, the world\'s most powerful physics experiment has sent the first beam around its 27km-long tunnel.

Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash particles together with cataclysmic force.

This will recreate conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

But it has not been plain sailing; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late.

The collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern.

The vast circular tunnel - the "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.

The magnets are there to steer the beam - made up of particles called protons - around this 27km-long ring.

Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.

Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.

Major effort

"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool.

"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."

The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?

"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

The currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe.

The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".

But Professor Virdee told BBC News: "Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us."

Full beam ahead

Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring.

On Wednesday, they sent a proton beam around the full circumference of the LHC tunnel.

Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets," Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, told BBC News.

If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beam. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.

Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC\'s predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.

The culprits - who were drinking a particular brand which advertising once claimed would "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach" - were never found.

After the the beam makes one turn, engineers are due to "close the orbit", allowing the beam to circulate continuously around the LHC.

Engineers will then try to "capture" it. The beam which circles the LHC is not continuous; it is composed of several packets - each about a metre long - containing billions of protons.

The protons would disperse if left to their own devices, so engineers use electrical forces to "grab" them, keeping the particles tightly huddled in packets.

Once the beam has been captured, the same system of electrical forces is used to give the particles an energetic kick, accelerating them to greater and greater speeds.

After Wednesday\'s test, engineers will need to get two beams running in opposite directions around the LHC. They can then carry out collisions by smashing them together.

Long haul

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider emerged in the early 1980s. The project was eventually approved in 1996 at a cost of 2.6bn Swiss Francs,

However, Cern underestimated equipment and engineering costs when it set out its original budget, plunging the lab into a cash crisis.

Cern had to borrow hundreds of millions of euros in bank loans to get the LHC completed. The current price is nearly four times that originally envisaged.

During winter, the LHC will be shut down, allowing equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy.

"What\'s so exciting is that we haven\'t had a large new facility starting up for years," explained Dr Shears.

"Our experiments are so huge, so complex and so expensive that they don\'t come along very often. When they do, we get all the physics out of them that we can."

Steve Myers said engineers would break out the champagne if all went to plan. But a particular brand of beer will not be on the menu, he said.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7604293.stm

[jocelyn]

Almost started this thread yesterday. This thing is indeed awesome.

Hawking bet $100 that they wouldn\'t find the Higgs. Ha ha.

[tyzack]

I bet $100 that this thing does not end the world.

[FrankZappa]

i agree. I saw a thing on good morning america today where the woman announcer after the piece airs goes " who would have known this was going on while we slept?" in utter shock that this project THAT HAS BEEN BEING CONSTRUCTED FOR THE PAST 30+ YEARS was happening without her knowledge. Yea, who would have known? People that say follow or work in the industry, go to school for physics, quantum mechanics, hell, general science? Maybe politicians, people who follow international (including their own governments) budgets seeing how this was a joint operation between several countries including the us? WHo would have known. Those crazy french, they just overnight built something over 17acres in size costing billions of dollars in equipment let alone man power to put it together... They did that all in one night.

ridiculous. It\'s people like that who are shocked to find there\'s an old nike base in staven.

[Gfunk]

[SlimPickens]