Cranking the science up 11: LHC operating at full power of 7TeV

[MSD]

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Protons, Sets Record

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reached a much-anticipated milestone today when it began smashing subatomic particles together at half its maximum power.

Earlier this month the "big bang machine" had broken its own energy record when it sent two 3.5-trillion-electron-volt (TeV) proton beams racing in opposite directions around the collider's 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) underground tunnel.

Today, at 1:06 p.m. local time in Geneva, Switzerland, LHC operators smashed those beams of protons together to create a record-shattering 7-TeV collision.

Reaching this point has been "marvelous," said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and head of the LHC's ALICE detector project.

"I've been involved in [the LHC] personally for over ten years ... It's like waiting ten years for Christmas to come," said Evans, who watched the collisions from the ALICE control center at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the atom smasher.

(See Large Hadron Collider pictures.)

Large Hadron Collider "Like a Child"

As the first data from the impacts were announced, physicists who had gathered at CERN applauded, jumped up and down, and clutched laptops displaying images of the collisions to their chests as if the computers were newborn babes.

A large part of the excitement at CERN—and around the world—was relief that the Large Hadron Collider's previous electrical problems have had no lasting effect on the machine's ability to perform as expected, said Ian Shipsey, a co-coordinator of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab in Illinois.

"When the machine started to do its early testing last fall, everyone was on a knife's edge. Every time the machine had a little problem, everyone imagined that it might have a disastrous meltdown," said Shipsey, who watched the show from half a world a way.

(See "Worst Case: Large Hadron Collider Spawns Planet-Devouring Black Hole")

"Now there's a sense of relief mixed with joy, and everybody's pinching themselves to make sure that it's real."

Despite today's smashing success, it's anything but smooth sailing from this point on, said Richard Cavvanaugh, also a co-coordinator at Fermilab's LHC Physics Center.

After all, there's still much to be done to ready the machine for the types of experiments scientists have in mind.

"This is a fantastic machine, but it's also very complex. It's very much like a small child," Cavvanaugh said. "The child has just been born and we're learning how to raise it, and during the process the child is going to go through teething and adolescence before finally reaching maturity."

LHC Still Just Half Power

The current plan is to run the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV continuously for 18 to 24 months. Then the LHC will shut down for up to a year to prepare the machine for 14-TeV collisions—the atom smasher's maximum operating energy.

The LHC's record-breaking smashups could uncover evidence of dark matter, discover new forces in physics, unveil new dimensions, and even find the Higgs boson, aka the God particle, a theoretical particle that physicists think is responsible for mass in the universe.

(See also "Large Hadron Collider to Have 'Practical' Spin-Offs?")

"Two years of continuous running is a tall order both for the LHC operators and the experiments, but it will be well worth the effort," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in a statement.

"By starting with a long run and concentrating preparations for 14-TeV collisions into a single shutdown, we're increasing the overall running time over the next three years, making up for lost time, and giving the experiments the chance to make their mark."

I mentioned at the end of my post about the importance of science that as much as we're able to see and as vast as it is, we only know what about 4% of it is.

Of the 4 fundamental forces, three have been worked out and connected under a single unified theory, and each is said to be mediated by a gauge boson, a particle that is fundamentally connected with the force, but the hypothetical particle that mediates gravity has been elusive. The theoretical Higgs Boson, which bears the unfortunate nickname of the God Particle, [correction]is thought to be the source of the mass of particles. Unfortunately, it is thought to be neutrally charged and doesn't interact with anything in a way that allows it to be directly observed. This is why we can't see most of the mass in the universe, and the only way to prove the existence of a Higgs Boson is to collide particles in a way that is thought to produce it, and observe the decay products of that collision. The reason for needing high energy is complex, but in simple terms, the higher the energy of the collision the more confident we can be that an observed event was the decay of a Higgs Boson and not something else. Once enough of these events are observed that it is almost impossible that the results came about due to chance, we can say we found it.

The top minds in many fields have come together and built the most complex machine ever to, among other things, find that missing 96% and give us an insight into what the universe is made of. As there is only one and there will only ever be one, it is its own prototype and has not been without some setbacks. The Large Hadron Collider is such a precise, sensitive piece of equipment that it has to be constantly calibrated to account for radio and gravitational interference from many sources. These include an expansion and contraction of the diameter of the 27km ring by roughly 1 millimeter just due to global tides. After this was accounted for, they discovered that the level of nearby Lake Geneva was interfering and calibrated for that.

Of course, such a project has it detractors. I referred to the nickname of "God Particle" as unfortunate because it implies that science is treading on the ground of religion, which is far from the case, but fundamentalists oppose research because of this misunderstanding. A quote by a scientist at CERN was taken out of context and we got a lot of hype about the possibility that the LHC could create a devastating black hole; the truth is that cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere so frequently at higher energies than are produced in the LHC that if a stable black hole could be produced at this energy, we wouldn't be around to build something so awesome. There was also an article earlier this year that took the unproven concept of retrocausality to an absurd extent and proposed that the Higgs Boson is so fundamentally unnatural that the LHC was sabotaging itself from the future. Opponents of the LHC are unfortunately misinformed or ignorant, often through no fault of their own since these are very abstract concepts that don't translate easily into layman's terms.

After years of tuning, a supermagnet quench that set it back months due to a flaw in wiring, and a brief loss of power when a seagull dropped a baguette on the power lines (such is the way of ultra precise instruments,) it all came together. This morning, a second calibration beam had to be injected after someone forgot to turn the detectors on for the first one, but everything turned out exactly as expected. At 1:06PM local time, two beams with a total energy of 7TeV were collided and produced usable data. Although the LHC has been setting records multiple times a day for the past few weeks, 7TeV (tera-electron-volts) is the highest energy produced by a particle accelerator and is the full operational voltage for the first two years of operation. In comparison, neutrons produced by fission in an atomic bomb peak at roughly 2MeV, 3,500,000 times less energy than was produced in this collision. This is important for reasons mentioned above and means that it's all revved up and ready to produce data.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Science has been turned up to 11. We're going to learn a lot from this. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them. If I can't, I'll pass them on to someone I know who's working at the LHCb detector and see what he says.

[BadNick]

Besides detractors who got tired of the Y2K panic and are looking for the next fantasy panic attack, I think a lot of people admire the science in something like this but might question the priorities as far as spending money/resources for this vs spending more for fighting hunger, disease, poverty, etc.

I hope the LHC will have enough practical spin-offs to justify all the effort. I like leading edge science so the LHC gives me a Large Hardon...relatively speaking.

[Jove]

I have been following the LHC progress for the last year and thank you for the details provided in this thread.

[GreyWolf]

I can't wait until they can miniaturize it to the point I can carry one in my pocket and zap everyone with my Flash Gordon ray-gun.

Until then, I'll have to be content with learning that dull old stuff that tells us how the universe is put together, came together, and which way it's going to Hell.

[Martian]

Note: This is not the LHC's full power. The LHC is capable of an energy of 7 TeV per particle, giving a full collision energy of 14 TeV. It's scheduled to reach that level some time in 2012, from what I last read.

And I enjoyed the retrocausality article. Thought it was hilarious.

That was a joke, right?

[Baraka_Guru]

I have a question!

What does this all mean?

I mean, is this a secrets of the universe sort of thing with a wide variety of applications?

Will we see new cancer treatments, more efficient energy production, and 2.5 terahertz microprocessors in our cell phones?

Will I get to see Mars?

[Boggy]

Did anyone else watch the live webcast last night?

I watched it for like 3 hours, and they kept having problems. Then I stood up to go get some cereal and they freakin succeeded in the collision!! I wasn't impressed.

I found it pretty funny how the place was full of brilliant physicists yet none of them could work simple recording equipment (earbud and mic) to save their lives. The host lady was pretty annoying too, she seemed like she knew nothing.

[Martian]

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

I have a question!

What does this all mean?

I mean, is this a secrets of the universe sort of thing with a wide variety of applications?

An excellent question.

The LHC is going to allow us to experiment with energies that were previously unheard of; in doing so, it's going to allow us to fill in a number of gaps in our knowledge of the physical Universe and how (and why) it works. It's way too early to predict what sort of practical applications will result from this, but it has the potential to change the face of human technology.

Understanding of our Universe eventually begets applications based on the principles learned. This is the basis for all modern technology

To answer your other questions: no, maybe, yes but not in the near future and only if you eat all your vegetables.

EDIT - Further Reading:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/arti...dron_collider/

[MSD]

I got the fundamental forces part wrong in the OP and rewrote it.

Originally Posted by BadNick

Besides detractors who got tired of the Y2K panic and are looking for the next fantasy panic attack, I think a lot of people admire the science in something like this but might question the priorities as far as spending money/resources for this vs spending more for fighting hunger, disease, poverty, etc.

I hope the LHC will have enough practical spin-offs to justify all the effort. I like leading edge science so the LHC gives me a Large Hardon...relatively speaking.

This isn't about making money, nobody is going to commercialize the Higgs Boson or weaponize quantum electrodynamics, it's all about knowledge and understanding, humankind at its most pure of intentions.

The Grid, the processing supercomputer farms, and the detectors will contribute to advancement of technology in the way that the Hubble Telescope was the point at which CCD sensors could be made profitably en masse for nonmilitary use, but nobody expects to see a return on investment. We might see something come out of it, but don't hold your breath.

Originally Posted by Martian

Note: This is not the LHC's full power. The LHC is capable of an energy of 7 TeV per particle, giving a full collision energy of 14 TeV. It's scheduled to reach that level some time in 2012, from what I last read.

And I enjoyed the retrocausality article. Thought it was hilarious.

That was a joke, right?

It's at max power for the first year and a half, after which it will be shut down and upgraded to the new full power. This is the part where it's its own prototype, we need to do stuff first before we go all the way. It's at full power until they upgrade.

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

I have a question!

What does this all mean?

I mean, is this a secrets of the universe sort of thing with a wide variety of applications?

Will we see new cancer treatments, more efficient energy production, and 2.5 terahertz microprocessors in our cell phones?

Will I get to see Mars?

Look at my old post linked in the OP for the significance of this. We don't know what 96% of the universe is, we've unified three of the four fundamental forces and the best we've done so far is doing math while being all "What the fuck is the difference between W and Z bosons, which mediate the electroweak force, and the masless photon?" We have a pretty good idea of this mass-giving gauge boson and how it will behave, but it's come full circle to where we were as early cavemen, and our best method of observing the world is by swinging things around, smashing them into each other, and seeing what happens.

Basically, we don't know what causes mass to exist. We won't see a cure for cancer, and we will not produce any cancer because there are safety measure in place to prevent radiation from hurting people or someone being dumb like Anatoli Bugorski and sticking his head in the particle beam. Although if you managed to sneak in and get in the way of the beam, it's high enough energy that it would literally blow a smoking hole through you. They have a huge slab of carbon 8 or 12 feet deep to absorbed dumped beams.