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

[voluptuary_manque]

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 ]

"Boffins"?

 

[trysail]

"Boffins"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin

 

[Dragonlipz]

I just hope that the Pepto holds out.....

 

[Dulce007]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin

Many Boffins died to bring us this information....

 

[Handley_Page]

Many Boffins died to bring us this information....

All too true.

It has to be said that Lewis Page can sometimes get a little ahead of himself.

 

[Handley_Page]

Saw this and thought it amusing:-


http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/11/earth-destroyed-by-large-hadron-collider-martian-questioned/

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Ah, Marvin the Martian. One of the great classix.

 

[trysail]

Large Hadron Collider restarts

http://en.rian.ru/science/20100228/158042800.html
17:59 28/02/2010
The world's most powerful atom smasher has been restarted, the Symmetry magazine reported Sunday.

The first protons were injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Saturday following a pre-New Year technical shutdown and traveled in both directions successfully.

"The circulating beams marked the end of a ten week particle-free hiatus for the world's largest particle accelerator, during which LHC scientists and engineers have prepared the machine for its biggest challenge yet, particle collisions at an energy of seven trillion electron volts (TeV). The beams also mark the beginning of the LHC's first long run, expected to last until at least mid-year 2011," Symmetry said.

In 2011, the collider will be shut down again to prepare it for its design collision energy of 14 TeV.

The $4.9-billion international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.

Experiments using the LHC were suspended in September 2008 shortly after a successful start, due to a malfunction of two superconducting magnets and a subsequent helium leak into the tunnel housing the device.

Work to repair and upgrade the collider after the breakdown cost almost $40 mln and took over a year. A system to protect it from such accidents, named the Quench Protection System, was installed, and the first beams were injected into the LHC on November 20.

MOSCOW, February 28 (RIA Novosti)

 

[stephen55]

Large Hardon envy.......????

Fucking scientists and their toys. LMFAO.

So they inadvertently create a black hole and...

Is it possible that Jenny is upset because scientists have a ten billion dollar toy to play with when the rest of us only have ten dollar toys from Love and Lace?

But then, perhaps this is what is really going on....

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

 

[mynameisben]

I'm hoping the technology that went into developing the LHC will hasten the development of the next generation of Sybian.

 

[stephen55]

Just think what could go wrong...........

I'm hoping the technology that went into developing the LHC will hasten the development of the next generation of Sybian.

Swiss engineering and French enthusiasm....it's going to be one hell of a Sybian!!
Good thing it's not Swiss enthusiasm and French engineering............

 

[mynameisben]

Good thing it's not Swiss enthusiasm and French engineering............

Right. Otherwise, the best you could hope for is a vibrating bidet that's completely neutral on whether you're coming or going.

 

[WRJames]

These are experiments I would prefer to have conducted far away -- at least a few light years. If there is anything to string theory, which of course there may not be, there is the possibility, remote of course, that a collision of this type could open up a leak into another dimension. A tiny one, of course. What possible harm could come of it?

Did anyone else watch Lex (my favorite SciFi series, except maybe for Babylon 5). Remember Earth dwindling away in the last episode?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

or perhaps Torchwood! They've now done a season three!

 

[stephen55]

These are experiments I would prefer to have conducted far away -- at least a few light years. If there is anything to string theory, which of course there may not be, there is the possibility, remote of course, that a collision of this type could open up a leak into another dimension. A tiny one, of course. What possible harm could come of it?

Did anyone else watch Lex (my favorite SciFi series, except maybe for Babylon 5). Remember Earth dwindling away in the last episode?

The LHC very well may show real evidence of hitherto unobserved extra dimensions in spacetime. But don't worry about opening up a leak into one. If they exist, they are already here.

 

[stephen55]

Academic budgeting...........

The head of the Physics Department was called to the office of the University president for a budget meeting.

"Why do you physicists always want so much money?" the president fumed. "All this expensive equipment, new labs, bigger this and better that; you should be more like the Mathematics Department. All they want are some chalkboards, pencils, paper and wastebaskets."

The head of Physics paused, then said, "Well, if you really want to run this university on the cheap, just look at the Philosophy Department. They don't even need wastebaskets."

 

[Handley_Page]

Following an over-cautious safety trip-out, they've now set the maximum Magnet current to 2000 Amps and hope to run the thing up again tonight.

 

[stephen55]

Bugs will save us........

What happened to my ka-boom?
I want my Earth shattering ka-boom!!

 

[stephen55]

More from stephen(Forrest Gump)55.......Dark is as dark does

I think this is to do with the experiment in some way but can someone explain how they actually know that most of the matter in the universe is undetected? Like ninety odd percent?

If my extremely vague understanding is correct: maths say there is more matter than can be detected.
Maths also says the big bang doesn't account for the mass of the universe.

Could it be that they have the maths wrong?

Like the wife said to her husband when he caught her in bed with the Vicar, the neighbor's wife, the paperboy and a duck, "It's complicated."

That said, don't worry about dark matter. It's dark energy that makes my head hurt.

 

[Handley_Page]

What happened to my ka-boom?
I want my Earth shattering ka-boom!!

Ah; what's up, Doc ?

 

[stephen55]

Following an over-cautious safety trip-out, they've now set the maximum Magnet current to 2000 Amps and hope to run the thing up again tonight.

Uhh....so just what exactly happens when you run 2000 Amps through a Sybian....
Just wonderin'.......

 

[trysail]

Geneva atom smasher to try record collisions
Tue Mar 23, 2:02 pm ET

GENEVA – Operators of the world's largest atom smasher said Tuesday they will try in a week to collide proton beams at record high energy in a new bid to discover secrets of the universe.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, says beams have been circulating in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 trillion electron volts since Friday, 3 1/2 times higher than the previous record set late last year. The operators have kept the beams apart but they will attempt to collide them on March 30.

The higher energy is meant to increase the likelihood that scientists will be able to examine the smallest particles and forces within the atom that could reveal more about the make-up of matter and the universe.

"We've still got a lot of work to do before collisions," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology. "Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself. It's a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way."

The collider — housed in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva — has been operating well since November when it was restarted following extensive repairs.

It soon eclipsed the next largest accelerator — the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago — pushing its energy to 1.18 trillion electron volts, or TeV. Tevatron operates at 0.98 TeV.

The $10 billion LHC was launched with great fanfare on Sept. 10, 2008, but it was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to the massive superconducting magnets and other parts of the collider some 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground.

CERN had to undertake a $40 million program of repairs and improvements before it was ready to retry the machine at the end of November. Then the collider performed almost flawlessly, giving scientists valuable data in the four-week run before Christmas.

CERN specialists have checked out and improved electrical connections and other parts throughout the machine.

The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of antimatter and the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientist theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe.

Scientists hope also to approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

When the collisions start at the new, higher energy, CERN plans to run the collider continuously for 18-24 months, much longer than previously.

This is because the machine operates at near absolute zero degrees, colder than outer space and shutting it off can require months to bring the equipment up to room temperature for any checks, repairs or improvements, CERN said.

The head of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, said it is likely to take months before any scientific discoveries are made, partly because it takes so long for computers to sort through the massive amount of data produced by the collisions.

Heuer said scientists hope by the end of this year to make discoveries into the mysterious dark matter that scientists believe comprises a quarter of the whole universe; the better understood visible universe makes up only 5 percent of the universe.

Dark matter has been theorized by scientists to account for missing mass and bent light in faraway galaxies. Scientists believe it makes galaxies spin faster.

A separate entity called "dark energy" makes up the remaining 70 percent of the universe, and this is understood to be associated with the vacuum that is evenly distributed in space and time. It is believed to accelerate the expansion of the universe.

After two years of running, the LHC will be shut down for about a year and the specialists will install improvements and make other changes to enable the collider to operate at its design energy of 7 TeV in each direction to produce collisions of 14 TeV.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

 

[oggbashan]

They've done it!

Or at least they think they have.

The Large Hadron Collider has produced several mini Big Bangs. Now they will take months to work out what they've done and what the results tell them but they now have real, if very small, Bangs for their Bucks (or Euros, Pounds and Swiss Francs).

Og

 

[trysail]

Or at least they think they have.

The Large Hadron Collider has produced several mini Big Bangs. Now they will take months to work out what they've done and what the results tell them but they now have real, if very small, Bangs for their Bucks (or Euros, Pounds and Swiss Francs).

Og

Scientists Collide Lead Ions In Big Bang Machine
by The Associated Press
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131168100

GENEVA November 8, 2010, 03:43 pm ET Scientists at the world's largest atom smasher said Monday they have succeeded in recreating conditions shortly after the Big Bang by switching the particles they use for collisions from protons to much heavier lead ions.

The Large Hadron Collider recorded its first lead ion collisions on Sunday and has since stabilized the twin beams sufficiently to start running physics experiments, said a spokeswoman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

The collisions produce an effect that is as close as researchers have ever come to observing the state of matter moments after the formation of the universe, which is believed to have begun with a colossal explosion known as the Big Bang.

The event inside the collider "is a very, very, very small bang," CERN spokeswoman Barbara Warmbein told The Associated Press.

Still, researchers are hoping the collisions will be powerful enough to produce a thick soup of matter called "quark-gluon plasma" that will help them gain a deeper insight into how the universe began.

The $10-billion Large Hadron Collider was fired up in September 2008 and, despite some technical setbacks, has been hailed by scientists as a key tool for understanding or reshaping our knowledge about the universe.

Most of the time it will be used to smash together protons in the hope that one of the four giant detectors - situated around the collider's 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border - will find evidence of dark matter, antimatter and maybe even hidden dimensions of space and time.

But for one month each year, before shutting down for winter maintenance in December, the Large Hadron Collider will smash together lead ions, said Warmbein.

Lead ions - which are lead atoms with the electrons removed - are much heavier than protons, meaning the energy used to circulate them is far higher.

"They are more likely to create the state of matter that ALICE is looking for," said Warmbein, referring to the detector that will be used to search for the plasma.

The resulting quark-gluon plasma, which is initially many times hotter than the sun, quickly cools, causing subatomic particles to stick together and form protons and neutrons. Scientists believe that by studying this process they will better understand how matter came into being.

Warmbein said that it will likely be months, if not years, before scientists make significant new discoveries.

 

[trysail]

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/28/132406486/the-hunt-is-on-massive-collider-churning-out-data


The Hunt Is On: Massive Collider Churning Out Data
by Geoff Brumfiel

This year the world's largest science experiment roared to life. Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has spent the year accelerating subatomic particles to near the speed of light and smashing them together. These collisions are being used to push the theories of physics to their limits.

It's hard to explain how much the Large Hadron Collider means to physicists, but you get a sense of it when you speak to Srini Rajagopalen. He works on a giant, underground detector, called ATLAS, that records what's produced in the collisions

"I've been working on ATLAS since 1996," he says. "I was down in that pit when it was completely empty and it was wonderful, it was huge. I have watched the detector being built; I was involved in the research and development and the production and the testing — putting the whole thing together."

Thousands of researchers like him have devoted the best years of their lives to getting the LHC and its detectors up and running. They switched it on with great fanfare in 2008, and collisions were just days away when a faulty connection triggered an explosion in the machine's liquid helium coolant. It was a devastating accident, though Steven Goldfarb, another researcher on ATLAS, puts the best face on it he can.

"As a lesson to the world, we arranged for the LHC to have a small explosion so that they could learn about how ... what happens when liquid helium expands," he says in jest. "We didn't really want this to happen, and it set us back for a good year or so."

'Instead Of Looking Out, We're Looking In'
This year, the LHC finally got going, and that means researchers can finally start looking for new particles. At the top of their list: one called the Higgs. Researchers think the Higgs explains the masses of all the other particles. Its discovery would be a major find, and everyone is excited. There's even a song: The ATLAS Boogie.

Think of the LHC as an underground racetrack. Instead of cars, the machine uses protons, the positive particles at the center of atoms. Two streams of protons travel in opposite directions around the 17-mile ring and collide inside four detectors the size of buildings.

"It's a bit harsh, this comparison, but imagine two cars crashing, and each car's got passengers in it and they crash into each other, and bits fly everywhere, right?" says David Francis, a researcher working on ATLAS. "And then your job is to identify what the cars were beforehand and how many passengers were in each car."

Except it's more than just the contents of the cars — smashing protons together actually makes new particles. Goldfarb likens turning on the collider to turning on the Hubble Space telescope.

"When the Hubble turned and looked out into space, they had some ideas what they were going to see, but they also didn't know, and that's probably the coolest part of what we do," Goldfarb says. "Instead of looking out, we're looking in. And we're looking for new things."

Sorting Through The Data
The LHC produces hundreds of millions of collisions each second, and sorting through all those collisions to find something like the Higgs requires a lot of computers, which are kept inside a two-story building above the ATLAS detector.

The interesting collisions get recorded to computers. Even throwing away most of the data from the collisions, researchers still end up with a lot of data.

"So if you're looking just down the aisle here, you see 19 racks — 19 cabinets of computers with 31 computers in a rack," he says. I think if you do the numbers, you end up with a pile of DVDs per year which is higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris — something like that," Goldfarb says.

Once researchers have those data, they can start to look for the Higgs. But that’s not the only thing they’re looking for. Joe Incandella is hoping they’ll find a mysterious kind of matter called dark matter. He works at the CMS detector, which is five miles away from ATLAS on the opposite side of the ring.

"Our galaxy is loaded with this dark matter, but we have no idea what it is," Incandella says. "It's very likely to be heavy stuff that we could produce with the LHC. All the theories indicate there's a good chance we produce it."

That's just the start of a list that gets progressively more sci-fi. The machine will study antimatter. It will probe milliseconds after the Big Bang. It could also turn up extra dimensions of space, microscopic black holes or something nobody's even thought of yet.

So far researchers haven't seen too much new, but with an Eiffel Tower's worth of data each year, they're optimistic. And after 15 years of waiting, Srini Rajagopalen says everyone's getting down to business.

"There are a lot of teams of people looking for signs of new physics," he says. "Finally we have data. This is what we've been looking for, waiting for, for such a long time."

*****​