phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."
The ever-elusive Higgs Bosom can't be directly observed (because it's like staring into the sun) therefore it must be indirectly observed -- in this case, by lowering the ambient temperature in the observational environment and watching for the most common secondary sign of it's presence, a phenomenon which researchers have fondly nicknamed the "sweater-puppy effect".
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to the Large Hadron Collider.
Caution: The Large Hadron Collider may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
The Large Hadron Collider contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use the Large Hadron Collider on concrete.
Discontinue use of the Large Hadron Collider if any of the following occurs:
* itching
* vertigo
* dizziness
* tingling in extremities
* loss of balance or coordination
* slurred speech
* temporary blindness
* profuse sweating
* or heart palpitations.
If the Large Hadron Collider begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
The Large Hadron Collider may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, the Large Hadron Collider should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of the Large Hadron Collider, the scientific community, and its parent company, the military-industrial complex, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of the Large Hadron Collider include an unknown glowing green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
The Large Hadron Collider has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt the Large Hadron Collider.
The Large Hadron Collider comes with a lifetime warranty.
If the magnets are superconducting, why would they need a good thermal conductor? It's not as if superconductors generate any heat in operation.
And are they really going to push the magnetic fields up to the point where they truly need to cool high-temp superconductors down to the edge of absolute zero? TFA says they're using enormous currents, but doesn't this leave an awful small margin?
If the magnets are superconducting, why would they need a good thermal conductor? It's not as if superconductors generate any heat in operation.
That's an excellent question.
I'm guessing they are not using HTC superconductors, which can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, due to the potential for current-induced superconductivity breakdown.
Here's a little background on the effect (Thank you Wikipedia...)
This equation, which is known as the London equation, predicts that the magnetic field in a superc
HTC technology is not available yet for applications like this. They are using conventional Sn3Ti (and NbTi to some extent) superconductors.
I'm not sure how the Wikipedia quote is relevant here. Although the wires in LHC are made of LTS materials, the materials still are type II superconductors.
The main reason to have large cooling capacity is a phenomenon called "quenching". The wires in the coils are actually made of really thin filaments of superconducting material inside a copper matrix. These filaments can (and do) go out of superconducting state because of a local problem, and at this small point there's naturally high ohmic heating. If the system can't respond quickly enough to lower the local temperature so that the superconducting state is restored, this point of normal state will start to spread at a high speed, causing more heating and boiling off the coolant quite expensively. So this is the reason why you need large cooling capacity and thermal conductivity.
No. One more time: there's NO resistance. In one experiment, for example, there were no measurable current decrease in a magnet after 20 years.
Low-TC superconductors are preferable because they have much higher critical current. Superconductors lose their superconductivity when a high enough magnetic field is applied. This magnetic field can be external or generated by the current passing through the superconductor itself.
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
1.9 K is below the so-called "lambda point" of helium, which stands at 2.2 K. That point corresponds to a transition to the superfluid state. This may help with heat dissipation in this setup.
Its Schwarzchild radius would be a few cm. Although it would exert a force of 1 g if you were one Earth radius away (6000 km) but if we manage to make an Earth-weight black hole it will be a triumph of miniaturization. We will have succeeded in finally making a black hole small enough to fit in your pocket.
In the scifi show Lexx, Earth is a type 13 planet which will shrink to the size of a pea due to physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_in_fiction [wikipedia.org]
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks? [TheXPhial] vaccuums [Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense? [TheXPhial] black holes [Guo_Si] Hey, you know what just isn't cool? [TheXPhial] lava?
Have you seen the cost of this large hagrid colliding thing? What is the point of wasting all that tax money looking for that higgs boson that, when found, will probably have been stepped on or at least be all dirty. Wouldn't it make more sense just to write the boson off at the next inventory count and just requisition a NEW higgs boson from stores? Okay, we need to be more environmentally aware now, and less wasteful of materials but this just confirms what people have told me about these CERN guys; they just take stuff to extremes.
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
Paradise. Why, when I was growin' up, we were all huddled together inside a higgs boson in the middle of a black hole. Every morning, we'd lick the black hole clean with our tongues, then huddle around the event horizon rubbing our hands together until it went *above* absolute zero.
Sensory overload. I think I melded that story and the previous with the packaging world record...oh wait, there's something happening on my other monitor, can't talk.
Because its not being built by Americans. It's being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research, A.K.A. 'CERN [wikipedia.org]' (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire). Thats why its not in the USA, and why its in France.
Could you please point me to the American supersonic jetliner?
Thought not - and seeing as how it was bits falling of a US plane that caused the disaster that killed off Concorde, you've got nothing to shout about.
Concorde was an elementally flawed idea - too small and too expensive to develop and run, but I saw the A380 at Farnborough the other day, and that's going to kill Boeing in the next few years, especially if they lose the USAF tanker contract too.
And 'super-massive supercollider'?
That's just a drag strip with 2 SUVs loaded with lard-arsed Yanks playing chicken:o)
Indeed, getting 1.9K in a lab, or in a single NMR magnet is not a big deal.
Try to do it with 1232 huge magnets, spread around 26.6 km, being some 100m underground,
and using 7600 km of super-conducting "cable" (270 000 km of superconducting "strand"). This is roughly 4700 tons of material to keep at 1.9K, and 120 tons of helium being recirculated all the time through these stuff to assure 150 kW of HEAT power is dissipated.
Noone ever has done a similar cryogenic installation at such scale before!
I agree, it's the scale of the cooldown that's impressive. In fact, when the LHC is running at full power, it will be drawing more power than the entire city of Geneva, and most of that power will go towards cooling.
I agree, the scale is something impressive. And certainly the scaling issues could make for an interesting and informative article. Or maybe not. Maybe it's one of the easiest of the many challenges they faced when building this thing (This is the cue for any slashdotters working on the project to chime in and educate us). The article certainly has little to say about the engineering challenges. But look at the headline and lede of the article:
Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.
Now tell me, what do you think a reader without any scientific knowledge will take away from this article, that the scale of the cooling is what makes it challenging, or the temperature itself? That 1.9 K is an exotically low temperature for physics experiments, or that it's mundane? This is what bothers me about most science journalism. The misleading statements and lack of information.
Come to think of it, that's the problem with most non-science journalism too.
I didn't mod the comment "Troll", and I don't consider it so. You cannot moderate and comment in the same thread - when you comment, your mods are cancelled.
As for burying it, how else in Europe are you going to build something 27 km across and dead level, with mounting points for thousands of tons of equipment? It is not below a mountain, it is below farmland. Anywhere reasonably flat in Europe is covered with towns and villages and criss-crossed with roads. And the flatness requirement is *exact*, so if the ground is only fairly flat, you will have to have bits in tunnels and/or on stilts anyway. On stilts is bad for carrying heavy loads. And you don't want your hypersensitive particle detectors triggered by cosmic radiation, so they will have to be heavily shielded anyway. Since the equipment needs to be well protected from accidents and weather for purely engineering reasons (big magnets, huge currents, super-cooling, vacuum). I could see problems with those magnets distorting every CRT-based television for hundreds of yards. The reason for burying it is purely for experimental purposes rather than safety. It is re-using the tunnel dug for an earlier detector, decommissioned a few years ago.
Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think a large hardon collider is for?
Parent
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
We don't wonder. We know why!
Parent
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Coolest place looking for the hottest bang? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Mal-2
Re:Coolest place looking for the hottest bang? (Score:5, Funny)
One of my little sisterâ(TM)s friends told her in serious horror that âoethe scientistsâ were going to destroy the earth with this device.
Talk about dumb! Doesn't she realize it's not just the Earth, but the entire Universe that is on the line here?!!!
Parent
Dark Knight sequel? (Score:5, Funny)
Trying to discover a hypothetical elementary particle, or trying to create Batman's next villain [youtube.com]?!
They're still searching? (Score:3, Funny)
Have they checked behind the couch?
Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Tongue contact with cold collider parts can result in serious injury.
Re:Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Warning! (Score:4, Funny)
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to the Large Hadron Collider.
Caution: The Large Hadron Collider may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
The Large Hadron Collider contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use the Large Hadron Collider on concrete.
Discontinue use of the Large Hadron Collider if any of the following occurs:
* itching
* vertigo
* dizziness
* tingling in extremities
* loss of balance or coordination
* slurred speech
* temporary blindness
* profuse sweating
* or heart palpitations.
If the Large Hadron Collider begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
The Large Hadron Collider may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, the Large Hadron Collider should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of the Large Hadron Collider, the scientific community, and its parent company, the military-industrial complex, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of the Large Hadron Collider include an unknown glowing green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
The Large Hadron Collider has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt the Large Hadron Collider.
The Large Hadron Collider comes with a lifetime warranty.
Parent
Curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
And are they really going to push the magnetic fields up to the point where they truly need to cool high-temp superconductors down to the edge of absolute zero? TFA says they're using enormous currents, but doesn't this leave an awful small margin?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the magnets are superconducting, why would they need a good thermal conductor? It's not as if superconductors generate any heat in operation.
That's an excellent question. I'm guessing they are not using HTC superconductors, which can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, due to the potential for current-induced superconductivity breakdown.
Here's a little background on the effect (Thank you Wikipedia...)
This equation, which is known as the London equation, predicts that the magnetic field in a superc
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
No. Superconductors generate exactly ZERO ohmic heating when current passes through them.
Not "some", but absolutely ZERO heating.
Parent
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. ANY superconductor has zero resistance. That's actually a part of definition for a superconductor.
Even high-temperature ones (with some caveats near critical temperature and in strong magnetic fields) have zero resistance.
Parent
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
No. One more time: there's NO resistance. In one experiment, for example, there were no measurable current decrease in a magnet after 20 years.
Low-TC superconductors are preferable because they have much higher critical current. Superconductors lose their superconductivity when a high enough magnetic field is applied. This magnetic field can be external or generated by the current passing through the superconductor itself.
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
Parent
Re:Curious... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
1.9 K is below the so-called "lambda point" of helium, which stands at 2.2 K. That point corresponds to a transition to the superfluid state. This may help with heat dissipation in this setup.
Parent
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Funny)
So, how much resistance is there in a Superconductor? A tiny bit?
Parent
Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
When they create a black hole and destroy the earth, they can say "but it was such a cool experiment..."
Actually, they can't.
Unless they synchronize the destruction with a space tourism trip.
...
Everybody! Start checking for suspicious space flights!
Parent
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, they can't.
Unless they synchronize the destruction with a space tourism trip.
...
Everybody! Start checking for suspicious space flights!
I heard every single one of the bastards has a towel and an electronic thumb all prepared.
Parent
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:4, Funny)
Well it would effectively put an end to the vast majority of our problems, replacing them with a single massive problem.
Parent
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:4, Informative)
Its Schwarzchild radius would be a few cm. Although it would exert a force of 1 g if you were one Earth radius away (6000 km) but if we manage to make an Earth-weight black hole it will be a triumph of miniaturization. We will have succeeded in finally making a black hole small enough to fit in your pocket.
Parent
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Har-de-har-har!
I mod myself down for that one.
Parent
Bring it on (Score:5, Funny)
We are doom, this being a type 13 planet (Score:3, Interesting)
Infinitely Improbable (Score:5, Funny)
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
obligatory bash.org quote (Score:5, Funny)
[TheXPhial] vaccuums
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
[TheXPhial] black holes
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
[TheXPhial] lava?
uneconomic (Score:5, Funny)
Have you seen the cost of this large hagrid colliding thing? What is the point of wasting all that tax money looking for that higgs boson that, when found, will probably have been stepped on or at least be all dirty. Wouldn't it make more sense just to write the boson off at the next inventory count and just requisition a NEW higgs boson from stores?
Okay, we need to be more environmentally aware now, and less wasteful of materials but this just confirms what people have told me about these CERN guys; they just take stuff to extremes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming that the LHC will destroy the Earth, this countdown is also the number of days left to lose your virginity.
Parent
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:4, Funny)
And don't forget to include the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey" Also Sprach Zarathustra
Also appropriate, Is Zarathustra in your pocket or are you just happy to see the LHC going online?
Also appropriate since we might see the birth of another solar system where the LHC used to be.
Parent
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:4, Funny)
Here's a calendar [globalartistvillage.org] designed to show when the LHC comes online and does its first experiment.
Parent
When I was growing up (Score:4, Funny)
When I was growing up, we had to get by on a few millikelvins, and we were grateful for every last one of them!
Parent
Re:When I was growing up (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:When I was growing up (Score:5, Funny)
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
Paradise. Why, when I was growin' up, we were all huddled together inside a higgs boson in the middle of a black hole. Every morning, we'd lick the black hole clean with our tongues, then huddle around the event horizon rubbing our hands together until it went *above* absolute zero.
Parent
Re:!news (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:!news (Score:4, Funny)
so what the fuck?
Sensory overload. I think I melded that story and the previous with the packaging world record...oh wait, there's something happening on my other monitor, can't talk.
Parent
Re:I thought.... (Score:5, Informative)
Because its not being built by Americans. It's being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research, A.K.A. 'CERN [wikipedia.org]' (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire). Thats why its not in the USA, and why its in France.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-hep.phys.cmu.edu/cms/PICT_ARCH/lhc_map.gif [cmu.edu]
Its about 90% under France.
Re:I thought.... (Score:5, Funny)
Could you please point me to the American supersonic jetliner?
Thought not - and seeing as how it was bits falling of a US plane that caused the disaster that killed off Concorde, you've got nothing to shout about.
Concorde was an elementally flawed idea - too small and too expensive to develop and run, but I saw the A380 at Farnborough the other day, and that's going to kill Boeing in the next few years, especially if they lose the USAF tanker contract too.
And 'super-massive supercollider'?
That's just a drag strip with 2 SUVs loaded with lard-arsed Yanks playing chicken :o)
Parent
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.
Now tell me, what do you think a reader without any scientific knowledge will take away from this article, that the scale of the cooling is what makes it challenging, or the temperature itself? That 1.9 K is an exotically low temperature for physics experiments, or that it's mundane? This is what bothers me about most science journalism. The misleading statements and lack of information.
Come to think of it, that's the problem with most non-science journalism too.
Parent
Re:CERN spin off technologies (Score:5, Informative)
Health and medicine
Transportation
Public safety
Consumer, home, and recreation
Environmental and agricultural resources
Computer technology
Industrial productivity
Parent
Re:Cataclysmic? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't mod the comment "Troll", and I don't consider it so. You cannot moderate and comment in the same thread - when you comment, your mods are cancelled.
As for burying it, how else in Europe are you going to build something 27 km across and dead level, with mounting points for thousands of tons of equipment? It is not below a mountain, it is below farmland. Anywhere reasonably flat in Europe is covered with towns and villages and criss-crossed with roads. And the flatness requirement is *exact*, so if the ground is only fairly flat, you will have to have bits in tunnels and/or on stilts anyway. On stilts is bad for carrying heavy loads. And you don't want your hypersensitive particle detectors triggered by cosmic radiation, so they will have to be heavily shielded anyway. Since the equipment needs to be well protected from accidents and weather for purely engineering reasons (big magnets, huge currents, super-cooling, vacuum). I could see problems with those magnets distorting every CRT-based television for hundreds of yards. The reason for burying it is purely for experimental purposes rather than safety. It is re-using the tunnel dug for an earlier detector, decommissioned a few years ago.
Parent