Large Hadron Collider Could Re-Start This Weekend
Written by Nancy Atkinson
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be re-started on this Saturday morning CERN officials said. Engineers are preparing to send a beam of sub-atomic particles around the 27km-long circular tunnel, which has been shut down since an accident in September 2008. Scientists hope to create conditions similar to those present moments after the Big Bang in search of the elusive Higgs particle to shed light on fundamental questions about the universe.
The massive "Big Bang Machine" as it's been called is located on the French-Swiss border and is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Watch an animated movie from CERN that explains how the LHC works.
1,200 superconducting magnets arranged end-to-end in the underground tunnel bend proton beams in opposite directions around the main "ring" at close to the speed of light.
At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, smashing into one another. Physicists hope to see new sub-atomic particles in the debris of these collisions.
The LHC had only recently been turned when on Sept. 19, 2008 a magnet problem called a "quench" caused a ton of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.
Liquid helium is used to cool the LHC to an operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F).
Low-energy collisions are expected a week or two after full beam. High energy collisions will take place starting in early 2010.
Source: BBC
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November 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
" The LHC had only recently been turned when on Sept. 19, 2008 a magnet problem called a "quench" caused a ton of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel. "
This is like going to a Sci Fi movie and hearing explosions in space.
Sorry to be so geeky but it wasn't a 'magnet' problem but a problem with a ' super conducting bus bar connection' ie; it went open circuit and burned through it's container walls releasing the liquid H3 coolant.
And to be complete the releasing of a ton of helium3 (not certain about the quantity but it was a lot) the significance of which is that it caused the physical damage of several magnets due to the pressure of the rapidly expanding helium.
I know the devil is in the details but that's the point.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Well, were off to see the Higgs field. If nothing else at least we can put that matter to rest.
LC
November 19th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
'The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be re-started on this Saturday morning CERN officials said'
Oh my god – we only have 36 hours to save the world!
November 20th, 2009 at 12:15 am
OMG We're too late!!!
Just kidding =P
November 20th, 2009 at 4:15 am
Awesome! Go, kick some protons
November 20th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Step aside Fermilab – time for the big boys to come out and play.
Show yourself Higgs field!
November 20th, 2009 at 5:47 am
OH my god, the doomsday is comming!!!!
November 20th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Soon [well, relatively] we will see who has the largest hadrons, Cern or Fermilab, magneto-a-magneto.
November 20th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Just a question, if we have protons colliding and it creates a black hole. What would the mass of this black hole be?
My guess is 2 proton mass, even though you let 10e+11 collide not all of them will create this black hole.
But at the speed of the LHC, one proton get so much energy that it becomes about 7000 times it mass. Since you have 2 protons colliding this could add up to a 14000 mass black hole?
And how long would this black hole last?
I calculated that you would need a 228 metric Tons mass black hole to keep it stable for 1 seconds before it dissapates. Clearly the LHC cannot send 228 metric tons of mass through its pipes.
November 20th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Well, that will be a great weight lifted from my quarks.
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 am
The LHC will not produce "real black holes." The proton and anti-proton coming head on at several TeV will produce a "blob." This blob contains all the stuff involving physics at this high energy interaction. It will exist for about 10^{-20} seconds and the decay into lower mass-energy decay products. This blob is what is of interest of course, but we can't directly observe it, but only infer physics from it by the decay products.
So what is this blob? We have to take the physics we understand or hypothesize about at this energy scale and construct it according to perturbation series of terms in field theory. Each of these terms is a quantum amplitude in a sort of quantum superposition of probabilities. Now gravity is in string/M-theory in the mix, and the compactified dimensions for these theories can hypothetically have larger scales at certain energies. This is a part of the job of the LHC, which is to see how the renormalization group flow operates. For high enough energies certain processes not possible at lower energy should become more probable. This may include gravitation.
So in this blob small amplitudes for black holes might exist. These are called soft black holes, which exist as quantum amplitudes for black holes with a higher value of the gravitational coupling constant G. The coupling constants of nature exhibit renormalization group changes at higher energy, which has been shown for quantum electrodynamics and the SU(2)xU(1) unification of electromagnetism and weak interactions. This gets of course into string theory, and the closed string which carry the supergravity multiplet couples to the D-brane of the universe more strongly by coupling to or transforming to an open IIB string.
So the blob decays into products, mesons, baryons and leptons and so forth. These are detected and the channel production of amplitudes in the “blob” are inferred. In this way the physics of the blob are deduced. This is a massive data process, involving up to a pentabyte of data per second.
I am waiting for Anaconda to rubbish up this blog thread!
LC
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:28 am
Oh to answer a question, the mass-energy of that blob will be in the 10s of TeV domain, or about a 100 times the mass of a proton. So if this contains a probability amplitude for a black hole that "soft black hole" will have about that much mass-energy.
LC
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Lawrence B, thank you for the information it makes sense even if I do not graps it completely.
The question was that I saw that the LHC created bundles of 10e+11 protons each and they have 2750 or something like this bundles.
So I though that not the 2750*10e+11 protons mass will become this blob but sometimes 2 protons only. with teh equivalent rest mass of 100 proton masses.
The reason why Anaconda does not react is because you did not use the magic word he triggers on. LOL
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
The beam comes in pulses. The LHC is similar to the Tevatron where I worked for a time. The system ramps up and every 10 seconds or so a pulse of protons one way and antiprotons the other way are accelerated. These two beams then fly through each other in the hadron calorimeter. A good percentage of these protons (p) and anti-protons (p-bar) fly through without interacting. and some p on p-bar ineractions do occur. As a rule these are going to be one on one interactions. It is not as if you get all 10^{11}p and p-bars to interact in one great interaction. It is more like you will get around 10^{11} interaction blobs, each producing thousands of tracks. This is why it is so hugely data intensive.
LC