Science Prepares To "Fire Up" the Large Hadron Collider: Investigating the "Big Bang"

[voluptuary_manque]

Uh-huh . . .

 

[trysail]

The following was posted on the GB on 13 September, 2008:

This is my answer to those who fear the full functioning Large Hardron Collider.

This is a process. It will take time to reduce the temperature of the container, and accellerate the proton beam, until the Tevetron is surpassed.

Landing on the moon was great, but this is better, in terms of human knowledge.

There is fear of black holes that will swallow the planet.

Knowledge is your friend.

There are four fundamental forces postulated by physics' Standard Model: Strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity.

The first three operate on the scale of subatomic particles. But gravity, at that scale, is too weak to have any effect. If you get enough mass together, something on a scale of the earth for example, then its effect is evident. All chemical compounds are molecules which consist of atoms of different elements. Atoms consist of a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, while electrons spin around the nucleus at various distances depending on their energy level. Protons have a positive charge, electrons are negative, and neutrons have no electrical charge. Atoms generally have the same number of electrons as protons, and it's the electromagnetic force that holds the electrons in orbit around the nucleus. Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. A proton is two "up" quarks and one "down" quark, a neutron is two downs and one up. The up quark has a +2/3 electrical charge, and the down quark has a -1/3 charge. So, the neutron's charge is the sum of -1/3 -1/3 +2/3, or zero, and the proton's is +2/3 +2/3 -1/3, which sums to one. There are quarks of greater mass than up and down, which don't occur in nature because of how rapidly they decay: strange, charm, top, and bottom. The top quark was finally produced in the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois in 1995.

Three fundamental forces, electromagnetism, gravity, and the weak force, decay as distance increases between the particles they act on. The strong force increases with distance, and it is this force that holds quarks together in pairs (mesons), or triplets (hadrons), protons and neutrons being the naturally occurring examples of hadrons. Free neutrons are not stable, but protons are, and because they are electrically charged, they can be accelerated by magnets in a circlular vacuum tube like the Large Hadron Collider. Because the strong force increases as quarks are pulled apart, eventually the energy required to pull them further apart becomes greater than the energy required to produce a new particle pair, and matter is created from energy between the two particles. The greater the energy input, the greater the mass of the particles created, and this is how colliders create exotic particles like strange quarks, charm quarks, and so on, and by observation of how these particles interact and decay, the rules that govern the universe can be deduced.

What does this have to do with black holes, I'll bet you're wondering. Well, at the beginning of the universe, it is thought that there was only one fundamental force. As the universe expanded and cooled, the forces differentiated into four. Gravity was the first to split from the others, then the strong force, and finally the weak and electromagnetic force split. It is understood how the last three are related and at what point they split but because gravity became a separate force so early, and doesn't interact at the quantum level, how it relates to the others isn't understood. A theory which integrates gravity with the other forces is the Holy Grail of Physics. The strong force is by far the strongest but its range is short, since beyond about the diameter of a nucleus, its strength is so great that the energy to push past it creates more matter. The electromagnetic force is 1/137th as strong, but its range is infinite, decreasing over distance. The weak nuclear force is one millionth the strength of the strong force, and its range is only one-thousandth the width of a proton. Gravity's range is infinite, but its strength is only 0. (imagine 39 zeros here) 6 as strong as the strong force. Clearly, the strong for rules. A black hole, however, is a result of gravity overcoming all the other forces.

On the astrophysical scale, only large stars, three times larger than our sun, have the mass necessary to create one. When they're burning, they are giant fusion reactors, the pressure in their interiors fusing light elements into heavy ones and creating heat which keeps gravity at bay. Initially, stars fuse Hydrogen into Helium, later produce elements like Oxygen and Carbon, and very large stars (over 8 times the size of our sun) enter the Silicon burning sequence which lasts only a day and ends with Nickel. From there, any further fusion requires an input of energy, and a ball of Nickel (which is heavier than Lead) of that size becomes a victim of gravity. For any amount of mass, there is a corresponding Schwarzschild Radius, within which if it can be compressed, will result in a black hole. For example, if the mass of the moon could be compressed into a ball only 0.2 millimeters in diameter, it would become a black hole. The smallest stellar black hole is about 10 miles in diameter. This represents a star which was about 2,500,000 miles in diameter, now compressed to a sphere of blackness 10 miles across, and the center of it is infinitely farther down from the surface of it.

How can Nature be raped by Reality in this way? When mass accumates to this extent, finally gravity participates at the quantum level. Unfortunately, once gravity triumphs, it swallows all record of what is happening, and nothing can be observed.

Gravity's power increases in stages as illustrated by star collapse. Our sun, when it dies will produce a "white dwarf" in which all its fuel is spent, and the power of gravity has compressed the atoms into a soup of atomic nuclei and electrons. Were its mass larger than the Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.4 solar masses, gravity would be able to overcome the electromagnetic force and force electrons and protons to combine to form neutrons. This is a Neutron Star, and its formation occurs in a violent explosion called a Supernova. The result is one ten-thousandth the diameter of the living star. Stars less than three times the size of the sun will stay in this state, with the strong nuclear force and gravity at equilibrium.


However, if the mass is great enough, at least three solar masses, the strong force cannot preserve the integrity of the neutrons, and they collapse into who knows what, because man, they're gone.

And that's a stellar black hole.

What's at the center? Maybe a ball of quark-matter the size of a grain of sand. Maybe quarks themselves collapse into something else. Only gravity knows, because that is the realm where gravity rules at the quantum level.

So what's a micro black hole?

That's a very small amount of mass which is compressed into its Schwarzschild Radius. But the scale is radically different from a stellar black hole. Matter is 99.99% empty space. If the moon were compressed into a 0.2 mm ball, could it eat the earth? There isn't enough energy in the sun to do that, so it's a non-question. The micro black holes that the Large Hadron Collider produces, if praise Jesus it does, will be extremely short-lived. In fact, if it does produce them, they may exist for so short a time that they can't be detected. Oh, well.

As I said, energy, thanks to the stong nuclear force, can be made to produce matter. Any LHC micro black holes will be sustained by energy, not gravity. They will be weak compared to gravity by many zeros. Anyone who has an interest in this, I hope this post has done something to reassure you.

 

[trysail]

This article was emailed to me. I do not know if it has made an appearance on the Internet.

Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird?
By EBEN HARRELL

Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.


While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.


The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons.


In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird. (A CERN spokesman said power cuts such as the one caused by the errant baguette are common for a device that requires as much electricity as the nearby city of Geneva, and that physicists are confident they will begin circulating atoms by the end of the year).


In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."


Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth's atmosphere. What's more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs' existence.


Nielsen counters that nature might allow a small number of Higgs to be produced by the Tevatron, but would prevent the production of the large number of particles the LHC is anticipated to produce. He also acknowledges that Higgs particles are probably produced in cosmic collisions, but says it's impossible to know whether nature has stopped a great deal of these collisions from happening. "It's possible that God avoids Higgs [particles] only when there are very many of them, but if there are a few, maybe He let's them go," he says.


Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock - the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides only an incomplete explanation of the universe. Until theorists get further data and evidence to move forward, the experimentalists believe, they end up simply making wild guesses - like those concerning time-traveling saboteurs - about how the universe works. "Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories are clearly crazy theories," says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist and Higgs-hunter at the DZero experiment at Fermilab. "In recent years theorists have been starving for experimental input and as a result, theories of second type are propagating widely. The majority of them have nothing to do with world we live in."


Nielsen concedes, "We have very little data, so theorists are going their own ways and making a lot of theories that may not be very plausible. We need guidance from experimentalists to make the theories more healthy."


"But," he adds, "in terms of our theory, we are submitting to a form of experiment. We are saying the LHC won't be allowed to produce a large number of Higgs. If it does, it would be very damaging to our theory."


Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it." In other words: if preposterous theories are mathematically sound and can be confirmed by observation, they are true, even if seemingly impossible to believe. To scientists in the early 20th century, for example, quantum mechanics may have seemed outrageous. "The concept that you could have a wave-particle duality - that an object could take on either wave-like properties or point-like properties, depending on how you observe it - takes a huge leap of imagination," says Roberto Roser, a scientist at Fermilab. "Sometimes outlandish papers turn out to be the laws of physics."


So what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs' former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC's delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. "If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist," he says.

 

[CharleyH]

If you've seen reports of the construction of CERN's gigantic particle accelerator near Geneva, this should prove to be one very big tool in the arsenal of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, if it suddenly gets very dark tomorrow, you feel extraordinarily heavy and the earth disappears, you'll know what's going on.


(Fair Use Excerpt)
Scientists to Probe Beginning of Time, Big Bang's Missing Mass
By Warren Giles

Sept. 9-- Scientists tomorrow will take a step closer to understanding the beginning of time when the European Organization for Nuclear Research powers up the world's biggest magnetic loop in the search for the universe's missing matter.

Particle physicists on the outskirts of Geneva are trying to find out what most of the universe is made of, and where it is, because most of the matter created in the ``Big Bang'' 13.7 billion years ago has disappeared. Adding up all the stars, planets, and black holes in the universe only accounts for about 4 percent of all the mass created when time began.

After a decade of work, physicists will fire the first particles around a 27-kilometer (16 mile) long magnetic loop buried 100 meters (328 feet) under ground in a tunnel large enough for subway trains through an environment colder than outer space.

As the particles lap at close to the speed of light some will collide, triggering new particles that may also help scientists understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating instead of slowing as predicted by theory.

``We may find a whole new family of particles that might account for the missing mass, the `dark matter' that we know must be there,'' says David Evans, a scientist who helped to build some of the electronic equipment that have one-billionth of a second to spot a collision. ``One way or another, there's a 100 percent chance we will find something new to physics.''

The unknown outcome has prompted a challenge at the European Court of Human Rights by chemist Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, to try to stop the experiment, claiming the event will create a black hole that will destroy the planet.

The CERN complex, overlooked by the Jura mountains which rise to 1,720 meters, is where one of CERN's alumni, Tim Berners- Lee, invented the first World Wide Web browser in 1989 to help physicists all over the globe better swap notes. CERN is the French acronym for the nuclear research organization.

While the spin-offs for technologies used in the 6 billion Swiss franc ($5.3 billion) ``Large Hadron Collider'' experiments may not be immediately obvious, applications from other particle physics research include three-dimensional hospital scanners and non-invasive surgery, which will improve as a result of CERN's work, says Evans.

One of CERN'S problems in generating an environment that resembles conditions one thousandth of a millionth of a second after the start of time, and the creation of all the universe's building material, is the volume of data generated by the observations.

Within a year the particle accelerator's four experiments, one of which involves equipment weighing 7,000 metric tons or the equivalent of a subterranean Eiffel Tower, will have spewed enough data to fill a pile of compact discs 12 miles high.

Some of the material that the physicists may find is labeled ``dark energy,'' and may help explain why ``something is still driving the expansion of the universe, but at the moment we have no idea what it is,'' says Evans, who dismisses the risk of earth being swallowed by a black hole.

``Nature already produces far higher-powered particle accelerations and the earth would already have been destroyed if that were possible,'' says Evans. The experiments are ``a once- in-a-lifetime experience, 10-times more powerful than anything anyone has ever built and the first time we know for sure that something new and exciting is going to happen.''

EXCITING! Finally we might be able to put all this God stuff behind us.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

EXCITING! Finally we might be able to put all this God stuff behind us.

Don't be silly. The existence or non-existence of God is not dependent on some silly physics experiment, no matter how expensive. And you don't need God to mess up CERN, just Murphy!

 

[Stella_Omega]

This article was emailed to me. I do not know if it has made an appearance on the Internet.[/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/B]

Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird?[/SIZE][/B]
By EBEN HARRELL

That's very funny stuff!

BTW, Google is your friend.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Fucking scientists and their toys. LMFAO.

So they inadvertently create a black hole and...

 

[TxRad]

Fucking scientists and their toys. LMFAO.

So they inadvertently create a black hole and...

*Insert giant sucking sound*

 

[R. Richard]

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but this 'big bang' thing is a plot bunny just waiting for an author.

 

[TxRad]

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but this 'big bang' thing is a plot bunny just waiting for an author.

You want to blow up a bunny?

I've always wondered who was fucking hard enough to cause the "Big Bang" in the first place.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I used the principle of the wormhole and applied it to the LHC in a SF story I started. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the story off the ground. Once I get Novel #1 polished, #2 finished and polished and this current Steampunk short done, I'll go back to it. There's more tentacle sex in it so I simply cannot resist!

 

[Handley_Page]

You want to blow up a bunny?

I've always wondered who was fucking hard enough to cause the "Big Bang" in the first place.

I'd have though that was obvious: God, of course.

 

[lance gt]

I'd have though that was obvious: God, of course.

But then the question remains, who was he fucking?

 

[Handley_Page]

But then the question remains, who was he fucking?

Perhaps He got bored with whatever he was doing, (or woke up and pressed a button at random) and had a THOUGHT.

 

[trysail]

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20091117/156878162.html

MOSCOW. (Yuri Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) - Recently there have been several news announcements from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) mostly associated with the planned restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is scheduled to power up November 19, give or take a few days.

The succession of previous unsuccessful attempts to start the collider has not hindered scientists in attempts to reproduce the so-called Big Bang in miniature. It is expected that this will help answer the question of why 90% of the blast's energy created anti-matter and only 10% matter.

Scientists also hope to be able to create particles, the existence of which has only been proven theoretically, in experimental conditions, including the so-called Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle." In the context of today's knowledge, this particle is responsible for the mass of elementary particles.

An important feature of the collider is the ability to simulate conditions that occur within black holes in space.

In their search for the truth, scientists are not worried about the hypothetical risk of creating microscopic black holes that could swallow surrounding matter in the accelerator tunnel.

CERN's Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer holds that the LHC is absolutely safe, no matter how much opponents may say to the contrary. Hundreds of theoretical calculations point to there being no danger, he emphasizes.

One can only hope that these calculations are born out in practice and that the experiments in the collider do not get out of control. Still, the power of the 27-kilometer accelerator is so great that it was buried at a depth of more than 100 meters underground.

Thus far, CERN experts have completed the cooling of all eight sectors of the collider to operating temperature, which is minus 271 degrees Celsius, after which the magnets, which become superconductors in the low temperature, energized.

The strength of current will gradually increase until it reaches the values necessary to control the particle beam "traveling" through the accelerator.

Additional tests of the electrical resistance of the contacts connecting magnets are being conducted. It was specifically because of a defect in one of these contacts that an accident occurred several days after the first activation of the accelerator. As the result of a breach in the insulation of the cryogenic cooling system, six tons of liquid helium spurted into the tunnel. It took 13 months to clean up the consequences of the accident and repairs cost 40 million Swiss francs.

The collider will be restarted only at a fourth of its design capacity, which is considered to be enough to achieve the main objective of creating the most powerful accelerator in the world - detection of the Higgs boson.

After activating the system and bringing it to design capacity, it will become the most powerful high-energy accelerator of elementary particles in the world, exceeding its nearest American counterparts - the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, located at the Fermilab in Illinois, and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven laboratory - by almost one order of magnitude.

It should be noted that the LHC will perform a wide range of research projects which the American colliders are simply incapable of.

The collider is expected to provide physicists with a literal avalanche of information. It is estimated that in order to record all of this information, more than two million ordinary compact discs (CDs) will be needed, and processing the information will require no fewer than 70,000 computers connected in series and with CERN.

Some experts think that the technology of building high-energy accelerators has reached its limit. Nevertheless, the International Linear Collider could be next and an even larger facility. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow claims it will be able to build it. A 40-kilometer tunnel will be located 10-15 meters below the Earth's surface and its construction will be much cheaper than other proposed projects.

The costs will be distributed among organizations participating in the project. At the same time, there is be an unwritten requirement - the country hosting the internationally important facility will have to foot 35% of the bill. This will be a very sizable sum, but the construction of such a facility will be prestigious for any country.

There are other contenders besides Russia. For example, the U.S. has announced that it is willing to pay for 50% of the costs if the collider is built in the U.S.

Yuri Zaitsev is an academic adviser to the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences.

 

[Dragonlipz]

This just in:

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report that the latest effort has indeed produced a singularity on a nanoscopic scale that is growing and will eventually either swallow the earth or initiate a global 'cool-down' that will be more disruptive than the next presidential sweepstakes in the USA....stay tuned...........

 

[Epmd607]

This just in:

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report that the latest effort has indeed produced a singularity on a nanoscopic scale that is growing and will eventually either swallow the earth or initiate a global 'cool-down' that will be more disruptive than the next presidential sweepstakes in the USA....stay tuned...........

I'm pumped, ready to sell those Jan10 out of the money calls against it.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

This just in:

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report that the latest effort has indeed produced a singularity on a nanoscopic scale that is growing and will eventually either swallow the earth or initiate a global 'cool-down' that will be more disruptive than the next presidential sweepstakes in the USA....stay tuned...........

True but the Hadron Collider broke down when the "God" particle stuck a loaf of french bread someone had left in the core during lunch break. Will the technological problems ever cease?

 

[Dragonlipz]

True but the Hadron Collider broke down when the "God" particle stuck a loaf of french bread someone had left in the core during lunch break. Will the technological problems ever cease?

Scientists and technicians at the LHC were not commenting about the "God" particle during this interview. It was acknowledged that the "God" particle was responsible for the consumption of a technician's lunch (the aforementioned 'loaf of french bread') along with a half bottle of cheap bordeaux......
It was up and running again after administration of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol......

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Well, they got it started. Can they keep it running? Stay tuned . . .

 

[Dragonlipz]

Well, they got it started. Can they keep it running? Stay tuned . . .

It depends on how much Pepto they have on hand............

 

[trysail]

Nov. 21 -- The world’s biggest particle collider resumed operations after an electrical fault caused a 14-month delay in the search for the universe’s missing mass.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circuit that runs under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, succeeded in setting up a clockwise circulating beam at 10 p.m. last night, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said in an e-mailed statement late yesterday.

A faulty electrical connection forced scientists to turn off the 6 billion Swiss-franc ($5.9 billion) collider days after it started on Sept. 10, 2008, according to the agency, known by its French acronym, CERN. The operating temperature of minus 271 degrees Celsius (minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit) was reached again last month, it said...



http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html

Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC

Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look out for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN1Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimization, followed by LHCb.

“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said ATLAS spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti.

“The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.

“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

 

[mynameisben]

Every time I see the title of this thread I switch the "d" and the "r" and end up with "Science prepares to 'Fire up' the Large Hardon Collider."

Is it me or just that I'm more used to seeing titles like that on this site?

No, no. It's not just you. I keep reading it as Large Hardon collider too. The text of those news stories doesn't help much either. They always seem to mention "massive releases of energy," and scientists getting "very excited," about creating conditions that existed immediately before "The Big Bang."

Frankly, I think they are all down there in the Swiss underground, developing the next generation of Sybian.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

The question is how much would someone be willing to pay for a ride, given the astronomical cost of the thing? Personally, I can't help but believe that particle physics is soooo twentieth century, dahling. The twenty-first belongs to biology.

 

[Handley_Page]

Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?

Boffins tear up schedule in race for dimensional portal

By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 24th November 2009 11:04 GMT

Forging ahead much faster than had been expected, particle-smashing boffins at the Large Hadron Collider have now carried out actual collisions - blasting beams of protons into one another at a healthy 450 giga-electron-volts each for total whack of 900 Ge V.

Since the mighty LHC was crippled last year in an unfortunate electro-burnout liquid helium super-fluid explosion mishap, top boffins have toiled like gnomes in tunnels buried deep beneath the foundations of the Swiss alps to repair the subterranean machine. Late on Friday night their efforts bore fruit, as the first beams of hadrons circulated all the way round the colossal 27km magnetic vacuum doughnut.


[ from "the Register" with thanks ]