A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider 191
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."
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.
Re:Cool (Score:3)
Re:Cool (Score:2)
It's one step closer to square one:
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF032AD-Reset.jpg#102 [pbfcomics.com]
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.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cool (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cool (Score:2)
There are two books of his freely downloadable from Project Gutenberg:
Relativity : the Special and General Theory [gutenberg.org]
Sidelights on Relativity [gutenberg.org]
I've read the former. Amazingly insightful, and approachable as well. The two examples stick with you: on a train traveling next to a platform, drop a stone and observe from a point on the train versus a point on the platform; and a man in outer space, in an opaque cubic box with a string attached to one surface; if someone pulls it at 9.8 m/(s*s), then the man experiences exactly what he would experience if the box were on the surface of the Earth. (Special and General, respectively.)
Compact?! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd hate to see the Large Muon Solenoid!
Re:Compact?! (Score:1)
Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:1)
Re:Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:2)
I don't even want to think about a hardon supercollider.
*phew* Thank you! Only came here for the hardon jokes, and for a minute I feared I wouldn't see any.
Re:Thank goodness there's no typo (Score:2)
Cue the hardon collision jokes (Score:1)
Life sucks (Score:1)
The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
When I'm paying for it -- Yes!
What I'm saying is that this is far more money than I'll ever see in this lifetime, for something that doesn't appear likely to improve my life one iota in the process. I'm stating a common point of view for many people about projects like this, which is not egotistic at all.
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (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 technology already is the LHC's grid computing infrastructure [web.cern.ch].
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
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
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].
Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive (Score:2)
The Web! (Score:2)
Yet here you are posting on a website. The web was developed at CERN for those of us working in large, international collaborations to communicate. It also turned out to be pretty good at letting everyone else communicate too. So without CERN there would be no Slashdot for you to post your comments on how you don't think science has done anything for you!
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 gravity might align, but we don't know which, if any, are right.
Now, to make your flying car is going to require some engineering work. That'll have to figure out how to cancel out gravity. Nobody knows if this is possible or if we can do it, but if we can and it is we're going to have to know how gravity works first.
So the LHC is the first step to getting you a flying car. I'm just not sure that we want people who judge 'basic science is worthless' to be making flight judgments in flying cars.
"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
Your utilities do that?? My sneaky bastards make me give one back for every one they give me... and every 1/120th of a second, they sell me the same one they just sold me!
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
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 property line and is "returned" to the utility. Thus completes one cycle.
The same logic applies wherever the electron starts out.
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
T = 1/120th: electron comes in
T = 1/60th: electron goes out again
So yes, it comes in once every 1/60th of a second, but the time between leaving and coming back again is a half cycle.
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
OK, the jokes REALLY dead now.
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
-l
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2)
Rodents Of Unusual Size [wikipedia.org] definitely exist.
They're even classified as fish (according to the Catholic Church), and can be eaten on Friday!
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Per proton collision (Score:2)
To get an idea of how big this really is imagine you gave all the protons in 1 gram of hydrogen the same energy. In 1g there are Avogadro's number of protons i.e. 6e23 so you would need ~1.2e18 joules!
IIRC the LHC projected luminsoity is something like 1e16 protons in the ring. However, accelerators are very inefficient and only a tiny fraction of the energy used is translated into proton energy. In the case of the LHC a considerable fraction of the energy is actually spent in refrigeration plants producing liquid helium to keep the superconducting magnets superconducting.
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 something that large.
Re:17 miles. (Score:1)
Re:17 miles. (Score:2)
Re:17 miles. (Score:2)
Pictures of the "mundane" parts here (Score:3, Informative)
What you see in the NY Times slide show is basically the most impressive parts of the LHC, the incredibly complex and massive detectors assembled in huge underground vaults. The remainder, while still fairly complicated and interesting, is orders of magnitude simpler.
The rest of the collider is mostly a 3 meter diameter tunnel (pic) [web.cern.ch], which has a track for getting people and equipment around it as needed, and the beam conduit. The physical tunnel is being reused from an older collider that was retired in 2000 to make way for this one, and I presume was dug with a tunnel boring machine.
The conduit (CAD rendering) [web.cern.ch] itself is more than just a pipe. The most important part is the two vacuum pipes inside that the beam runs through, and the 9,000+ magnets around the pipes that electromagnetically constrain and accellerate the particles so they follow the 17 mile loop instead of smashing uselessly into the walls. It also contains the electrical lines that power the magnets, and helium lines that keep them cool. Some stray collisions are expected, so it also contains a little bit of radiation shielding, although I don't believe people are supposed to be in the tunnel when it is operating.
More Pictures [web.cern.ch]
LHC Outreach Page [web.cern.ch]
Map showing cities and Swiss/French border [web.cern.ch]
Re:17 miles. (Score:2)
Re:17 miles. (Score:2)
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:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (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 particles have to be massless to preserve gauge invariance. A Higgs condensate breaks the SU(2) gauge symmetry by making the gauge fields massive. How does your idea work?
Re:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:2)
* Gravitons are spin 2, but it's not true that spin 2 particles are gravitons. Can you identify your rank-2 symmetry generators with the Lorentz group? Finally, is it renormalizable?
Re:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:2)
So, if your gravity looks anything like general relativity, it should exhibit this property.
Anyway, these are indeed technical points that I was curious about -- thanks for fielding my questions.
Re:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:2)
On point of contention is EM tensor_product Weak tensor_product Strong. That leads to a nice, neat, 12 degrees of freedom. That also reflects the history of particle physics, where we learned about EM first, then the weak force in the 1930s, then then eight-fold way in the 1960s. Things is, U(1), SU(2), and U(1)xSU(2) are subgroups of SU(3). I didn't read that, I saw it, and that was confirmed by talking with a math guy from Mathematica at an APS meeting. I think the standard model should more tightly reflect what goes on with the math, not the history of our discoveries in particle physics. I know this makes EM and the weak force feel "too close" to the strong force, but the math side of my brain says too bad, that's the way it goes. This is not a high energy theory. It is an odd assault on the second x of U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3).
What's the contention here? The U(1) tensor SU(2) tensor SU(3) gauge is known and has been confirmed via particle classification. What's currently unknown is whether the gauge group is somewhat larger. For example, SU(5) or SU(3) tensor SU(3). It can't be too big without having more forces than the four known ones.Re:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:2)
Re:We don't need no stinkin' Higgs (Score:2)
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)
Re:BETTER HADRON COVERAGE (Score:2)
I'm a big fan of spending lots of money on scientific research, but sometimes economics gets in the way. I would love to know the answers now too, but if the human economy just can't handle that much of an investment in basic research, then it can't.
Now, I personally think that the economy could probably spend 10 - 100 times more on basic research than it does and get a lot of good return on the investment. However, technology will progress in the meantime and hopefully, making more and more powerful colliders will become cheaper over time. Until the point at which making bigger colliders becomes cheap enough that governments will be willing to swallow the expense.
But I don't think that this is the end of particle physics. It just might delay it.
Please stop talking about power/energy! (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow.. 'energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts', you say?????
It's almost 7E-13 kWh! So I guess I could power trillions of LHC with just a liter of oil.
Re:Please stop talking about power/energy! (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.
/. 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.
Re:/. does it again! (Score:2)
Re:/. does it again! (Score:2)
Re:obligatory (Score:2)
OK, so you go to the bottom of the confusion. The LHC runs at 40MHz. All of the detector readout in all experiments is tuned to this number. If it would be off... ouch! The catch is that there are *empty* bunches. These known as the orbit, last for a few microseconds and what most detectors do during this time is to reset their front-ends which might have beserk with radiation. But really, the orbit gap comes from the insertion mechanism of the beam from the SPS to the LHC. Accounting for the fact that there are no collisions during orbit, there are 30 million collisions in one second *on average*. Saying that there are 30 million collisions a second, results in people like you, going ahead and calculating the MHz from that... because the clause "a second" implies "constant and repetitive" to some extent. "30 million collisions in one second" would be alright as well as saying "a second on average."
I am so humbled. NYTimes writer actually replied to my e-mail on this. I suggested to the NYTimes to add "on average" to this to clear up the confusion, to which he replied with " I might have said something like that if I had had more time after I discovered this little glitch. "
I remain, very much, a fan of the NYTimes...
Spiderman 2 (Score:1)
Just a casual observation: it seems somewhat ironic that the article describes as "spidermen" the physicists working on the collider, which will, among other things, make suns.
I don't know if it was intentional, but if it was, it's a clever and very subtle reference to the popular comic/movie.
Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY? (Score:1)
Re:Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY? (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 trillion eV, or even <gasp>one Joule</gasp>. Actually, the power required (tens to of Megawatts, enough for a small city) is more impressive than the total energy expended (not so much since the energy is expended over a very short time).
There's a youtube of their IT manager (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There's a youtube of their IT manager (Score:2, Insightful)
The early stages of the analysis are often in dedicated hardware, because general purpose processors are not fast enough. You need to connect those systems together as well. Then you need to debug these software beasts, since they need to make a good mathematical analysis 30 million times a second. And with 7000 people waiting for results, you don't want to be caught with a bug...
One more thing on processors:
There's always a better processor on the horizon. Wasn't it NASA that still uses 8086 processors in their Space Shuttle?
Re:There's a youtube of their IT manager (Score:2)
Yeah? From Wikipedia: "Due to the nature of its applications, Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation. The SPEs are capable of performing double precision calculations, albeit with an order of magnitude performance penalty."
So, maybe P4 fairs better? He might not be a blithering idiot. Note: the P4 code should run just fine on the latest Xeons with the Core architecture (a.k.a smokin').
IIRC the Athlons also do slightly better at FP in the current generation.
kneepads? oh yeah... (Score:1, Funny)
The kneepads are for when the Senators, Representatives, various goverment functionaries, and lobbyists [wisegeek.com] visit.
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} x 1.602x10^{-19} Joules. You multiply it all out, you get 362MegaJoules stored in the beam around the LHC ring.
That's 1 small cruise ship of 10,000 tons moving at 30km/hour.
450 automobioles of 2tons moving at 100km/hour.
Is enough to melt 500kg of copper. (which is actually a worry if the beams "are lost" due to a magnet quench and they hit the vacuum pipe!)
Oh, btw, the power consumption of the LHC only (excluding the detectors) is ~120MW.
Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (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 is 360MegaJoules. It is fairly easy to calculate actually:
Yes, it is.
Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (Score:2)
362 million joules = 100,555.556 watt hours [google.com]
Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (Score:2)
Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision (Score:2)
The conversation went "Oh, but we just paid so much money for the damn superconducting magnets? Why do they still eat so much power?" "Oh-oh" (Ok, there were no machine engineers around, but a bunch of physicists. The machine engineers though want to blow out the brains of physicists on a regular basis, who they consider idiots... So you see, it is all in good humor.) Luckily, we still remember how to calculate synchrotron losses. Sort of...
I don't get it. (Score:2, Funny)
I want this camera... (Score:2)
Of course, I'm curious how it can do 40 million pictures per second, if particles being spun around the track by superconductors can only collide 20 million times per second. I know it's a 17 mile track, but still, taking that as a base for the maximum speed you can get a particle going, it makes me wonder how you could push 60 million pixels worth of data over even a short span of cable, 40 million times per second... I'd love to see more info just on the camera, and how they manage to push that much data, that quickly.
Also, I wonder what's being done with the old supercollider that the US was building in Texas? Is it just sitting there, rusting?
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.
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:1)
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:1)
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:2)
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:3, Insightful)
"the physics is complex, but the controls are so simple, even a theoretical physicist can use it."
- chribo
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sexist/Agist (Score:2)
Re:Cue "Large Hardon" jokes (Score:2)