One of the Coolest Places In the Universe

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."

Coolest place looking for the hottest bang?

[Mal-2]

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

Curious...

[The Master Control P]

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?

We are doom, this being a type 13 planet

[seb42]

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]

silly question concerning microwave background

[Anonymous Coward]

So whatever the cooling mechanism is removes heat from the volume faster than the microwave background heats it up?

CERN spin off technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

With all this talk about the LHC starting up soon lets not forget about the "spin out" technologies that they have developed along the way. eg.

1) www [web.cern.ch] - One of the most important developments in computing.

2) Medipix [www.cern.ch] - The only full spectroscopic x-ray detector designed for medical imaging.

What has NASA done? Teflon for non-stick frying pans?

Re:Another example of useless science journalism

[rasputin465]

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.

Re:!news

[naich]

We can get 0.05 K easily here with one of our dilution fridges or our ADR. 1.9K is nothing to boast about but I guess it's the sheer size of what they are cooling which makes it impressive.

This assumes the big bang is correct.

[Mick Malkemus]

The apparent movement of galaxies moving away from each other is what gives rise to the notion of the big bang. What if this is just an optical illusion? If matter in the universe is gradually shrinking in size (there is plenty of room for a lot of shrinkage in each atom) by a means we are not yet familiar with (forty standard kilogram weights around the world are mysteriously different weights now), then the universe started off in a superheated cloud and gradually cooled off in our local area. As galaxies shrink, the space between them increases, giving rise to the illusion that they are flying apart (faster and faster), when they could just be staying in relatively the same areas they originally formed in. This explanation, which I call the big collapse, doesn't need the iffy explanation of 'everything coming from a singularity'. It doesn't require the awkward expansion period. It doesn't even require different physics at the time of the creation of our universe, which happened over time, not in a relative instant. The big bang is likely a ludicrous explanation that's helping to lead us down a gigantic blind alley in the advancement of science.

Re:Curious...

[quanminoan]

The superconducting cables may still have some temperature fluctuation which takes a small part out of its superconducting state. When this happens all that current suddenly becomes ohmic and the cable is potentially destroyed (quench). They design in regular cable strands (copper usually) which can carry this current for a split second until circuits turn off the entire cable before it is destroyed. Otherwise you're hoping your cable remains perfectly cool, and if it fails you have to replace millions of dollars (at least) of superconducting cable.

Re:Coolest place looking for the hottest bang?

[thedonger]

Not that I want get all Star Trekkerry on you, but remember the episode where the they were f**king up some race of beings when the warp drive was used in a certain part of the universe, but the Federation had no idea that such a thing was even possible?

We know we exist, but we don't know what existence means outside of life on our own planet, let alone solar system, let alone galaxy, let alone universe. We don't even know what a universe is. We don't know the nature of multi-dimensional existence, and we have no idea if slamming shit together at the speed of light may in fact be causing headaches for someone the existence of whom we can't even imagine. Like when the college kids party until 4AM in the apartment above you.

Re:Cataclysmic?

[AlecC]

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.

Field interactions

[EmagGeek]

Okay, so I have a couple of questions then. One of the one-page papers compares the relationship between the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson to the relationship between the Electromagnetic Field and the Photon.

Particles that interact with Electromagnetic fields gain energy, but they can also lose energy in the case of natural energy decay. For example, an electron in a high energy state decays to a lower energy state, giving off a photon / emitting electromagnetic radiation. Similarly, moving charged particles emit an electromagnetic field.

Since interactions between zero-mass particles and the Higgs field gives rise to mass, isn't there also a necessary mechanism for those particles giving up that mass through decay? Also, do moving masses produce changes in the surrounding Higgs field in the form of a traveling wave?

We can detect the presence of an electromagnetic field by observing its effects on particles that we know can interact with it. The supposition here seems to be that all of the basic particles start with zero mass and subsequently gain it from interacting with the Higgs field. Since we "know" that these particles can interact with the Higgs field, how come we cannot detect the Higgs effect on them, which I suppose might be a variation in the mass?

Just some curiosities...