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A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue May 15, 2007 11:41 AM
from the big-science dept.
from the big-science dept.
davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."
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holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."
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Cool (Score:5, Funny)
They are getting ready to see the universe born again.
It's like having a Tivo with a 6,000 year replay capacity!
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
- When youre creating a captive mini black hole on Earth I would have thought hard hats and steel toecapped boots would be a MINIMUM safety requirement.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Does not compute (Score:4, Funny)
For the old school among us, that's 59,840 cubits, 370 metric tons of gold, and 1.18170471 x 10^-19 foot pounds, respectively.
Or about 3 Libraries of Congress accelerating at about 1.72 x 10^-183 m/s/s.
Parent
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Compact?! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd hate to see the Large Muon Solenoid!
Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers,
Qc_dk
Ps. I used to work at cern and with the 10'000 men and 2 women there, there certainly was a lot of large hardon collisions. I believe you USians call it cockblocking.
Parent
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To plunge into the unknown is a moral imperative for any thinking being.
If all you care about are material practicalities, this thing is roughly 1/50th the current cost of a certain misadventure in the Middle East, and is more likely to produce cool stuff. One particularly exciting bit of tech
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are
we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
— at the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
Parent
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:4, Informative)
That aside, the answer to your question is that we don't know what we're going to learn from projects like this. But we do fundamental research like this anyway, for a variety of reasons best expressed by this article [math.mun.ca].
Parent
Flying Cars (Score:3, Funny)
You're going to get a flying car, OK?
Well, maybe. See, the LHC is going to be able to smash things at the Weak Scale energy, which is where we need to look (at what comes out of smashed things) to pick among many theories of how the universe works. Depending on the results, dozens of models will be ruled out, and, if we're lucky, one will be left standing.
This model will likely contain a theory of quantum gravity. We have lots of ideas about how quantum physics and g
"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let's start a zero voltage with the electron right on the border of your property. The voltage rises to 110/220, and the electron moves towards your house and you "buy" it. Voltage drops to zero and it comes to a halt inside your house somewhere. Voltage drops to -110/220 and the electron moves away from your house. Voltage rises to zero just as the electron crosses your prop
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Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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17 miles. (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps it is just the structural engineer side of me, but i would love to know more about how they made some
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Pictures of the "mundane" parts here (Score:3, Informative)
We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:4, Interesting)
U(1) is a unit circle in the complex plane. SU(2) is a unit quaternion which is easy to animate if you have software for the job (barf out thousands of exp(q-q*), sort by time, drive through POVRay). Electroweak is the product of the first two. The animation of SU(3) tells you what the standard model is about, namely the ability to smoothly describe any event seen by an observer at 0,0,0,0. Gravity is about the sizes of things, so scale the ball to different sizes in a smooth way, and that is the symmetry behind gravity.
It is inertial mass that breaks the symmetry of standard model, not some phony Mexican hat dance around a false god of a vacuum.
doug
Re: (Score:2)
* What does the quarternion formulation tell us that the standard Standard Model formulation does not? I understand that it provides a unified framework for treating the different groups, but particles in the Standard Model are still charged separately under electroweak and strong -- is this a high energy theory, where we expect gauge coupling unification somewhere?
* I don't understand your concept of inertial mass breaking gauge symmetries. The Standard Model is Lorentz invariant, and gauge p
Born again... (Score:2)
Great... So the next time I get stuck behind it in traffic I'm gonna have to stare at some stupid fish logo...
BETTER HADRON COVERAGE (Score:4, Informative)
/. does it again! (Score:5, Informative)
It is called the LHC -- Large Hadron Collider. Not the Hadron SuperCollider. The SuperCollider [slashdot.org] is dead. It was called the SSC. But it has passed on. It has ceased to be! It has expired and gone to meet its maker! Its a stiff! Bereft of line and rests in peaces in TX! It's kicked the bucket and shuffled off its mortal coil! (Gee. I wish I could write this about the M$! Grrr!!)
The energy consumption is 14 trillion electron volts?! Wt..? Last time, I checked the LHC could not run on days where the electricity prices were high. Actually, it can not run during winter for that reason. It and the detectors consume as much energy as you get out from a medium-sized nuclear reactor -- and that's why it sits partially in France and not fully in Switzerland. (France produces a whole lot more power than Switzerland.)
"The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. " Huh? What expected experiments? The experiments have been in construction now for seven years. You mean expected results?!
Honestly, how many mistakes can you make in one paragraph??
Sorry about the rant, but I am so annoyed with the latest reports about M$'s threats, that I had to vent. I feel better now. Slightly.
Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
14 trillion eV ? (Score:2)
The blurb above looks like a Dr. Evil quote -- I assume you realize that "14 trillion eV" is a miniscule amount of energy? It's about 2 micro Joules, or .5 microcalories.
On the scale of a single particle, this is a tremendous amount of energy (for comparison, the energy scale for chemical reactions such as combustion is a few eV). Imprtaing so much energy to a particle (as well as powering the detectors, cooling appartus etc) means the whole collider has a massive energy budget -- way way bigger than 14
There's a youtube of their IT manager (Score:3, Interesting)
Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (Score:2, Informative)
14 TeV is the amount of energy that is in a collision from two 7TeV beams colliding. In this case, the beam means particles (protons) accelerated to carry 7TeV of momentum. But that's just one "particle". The LHC, there are many "buckets" of particles being stored and collided and the total stored energy around the whole ring is 360MegaJoules. It is fairly easy to calculate actually:
There are 2808 bunches around the ring, each containing 1.15x10^{11} protons each with 7TeV of momentum. 7TeV = 7x10^{12}
Re: (Score:2)
I am pretty sure that most of that 120MW is used to power the electromagnets that confine the beams.
14 TeV is the amount of energy that is in a collision from two 7TeV beams colliding. In this case, the beam means particles (protons) accelerated to carry 7TeV of momentum. But that's just one "particle". The LHC, there are many "buckets" of particles being stored and collided and the total stored energy around the whole ring i
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Corrected summary (Score:3, Informative)
Circumference = 27 kilometers (~17.5 miles), cost = 8 billion USD (presumably, and only for the construction), energy consumption = ~120 MW, particle energy = 14 TeV.
More interesting statistics [web.cern.ch] are available on the LHC outreach site.
What a half-assed attempt at a submission. Even the title is a mix between the SSC [bbc.co.uk] and the LHC.
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
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"the physics is complex, but the controls are so simple, even a theoretical physicist can use it."
- chribo
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So if the beam had a current of 1 amp (1 Coulomb / sec) then the energy of the particles in the beam would be 6.241×10^18 * 7x10^-13 = 4.3*10^6 kW*Hr. That's a lot of energy, and I'm guessing the beam currents are MUCH less than 1 amp. BTW, power = energy / time or work / time.
Mods are clueless on this one.