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Comments: 305 +- Science: LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts on Monday November 30, @01:54PM
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The LHC has become the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, weighing in at over one trillion electron volts. "Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts. On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this 'pilot beam,' reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT. The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001. The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts."
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Submission: LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts by Anonymous Coward
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When will the science begin (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Science isn't about instant gratification.
Not a sperm donor, I take it.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Funny)
That's self gratification, not instant gratification. Although I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that last part...
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:4, Funny)
Have you seen inside an "adult shop" recently? Looks that way.
Besides, whatever it takes to get teenagers into science is fine with me.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Said amount of money being a little less than 1% of what the United States alone spent on its stimulus bill. And the project employs several thousand people.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, all money ever does is employ people. That's what money is - a way to get other people to give you the product of their labors.
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:4)
So how much patience do we need to start experimentation, let alone completing it, publishing the raw findings, analyzing the raw findings, and the coming out with some results?
Not to mention dropping us some more results on the LHC @ Home [lhcathome.cern.ch] grid. World Community Grid has been rather lonely for some time...
-l
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Informative)
haha, are you suggesting that europe pumps over 14bn euro into a machine and then because some people are slightly impatient, they should whack it up to 11 to see what happens?
"hey, we've not done any tests yet, why are you ramping it up to 7Tev?"
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient."
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient!? what are we waiting for??"
*disturbing explosion from underground*
"oh. shit."
science will start in january/february. to be honest, what they're finishing up now is calibrating the detectors which is pretty vital -- and even so they've run beams with more energy than any accelerator ever has before. or do you plan to somehow puzzle out the observations by the power of voodoo?
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:4, Informative)
It has been doing "science" for quite a while now, my BOINC client crunched some LHC data long ago, the detectors run just fine off natural cosmic rays collisions. Even at partial energies they could find things they are looking for because HE physics is a probabilistic endeavor, it's just more likely for the events to occur at higher average energies and luminosities.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, the scientific community actually doesn't "understand the reasoning" and is as ignorant as the general public.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see anything in the article that says they'll be waiting another year to test it at higher energies. I do see that they expect to do physics with it "next year" -- i.e. in the calendar year 2010, which is only a month away.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Interesting)
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LHC [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll?
It was only switched on again a week ago, and you want it to be spewing out Higgs' already?!!?
These machines are *stunningly* complex, and always take years to reach their full potential. Google for the luminosity history of any major machine (LEP, Tevatron, etc.) to see how long they took to reach their design goals.
Trust me, as a particle physicist (posting anonymously to preserve moderations), this week has been amazingly exciting, and everyone I know is stunned by how fast this machine is coming back on.
"step it up a notch" -- you *must* be a troll.
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Re:When will the science begin (Score:4, Interesting)
When does the Science ever begin with a particle accelerator project? What do you define as science? They are now crashing particles faster than the Tevatron (as is the subject of the article) and have taken the title of "most powerful particle accelerator". Will this yield results different from what the Tevatron has seen for the past few years? We won't know until it happens. Will the LHC quickly ramp up to 7 TeV? We won't know until it happens. Will anything come of the data produced when it runs at 7 TeV? Again, we won't know until it happens. Considering how much time and money has been spent we should expect the odds are really good that some unique science will come of it some day, but to say that a decade long project is going too slowly because full power won't be reached for another year seems a little short sighted.
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Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they know how to conduct themselves this time around.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No. Now it's time for them to amp things up!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No collisions yet, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are these with collisions or merely accelerated beams in a loop? IIRC, the Tevatron did 2x0.98 TeV collisions. Which would be, well ... a bigger bang :)
But the flip side is that we've built the most powerful ray gun ever, now we just need to wait till the aliens attack.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The damage in the breakdown was all caused by the energy stored in the magnets that failed and by the pressure of the vaporizing helium.
If only.... (Score:5, Funny)
now we could feed THAT into a flux capacitor.....
Question about particle accelerators (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand that particles moving at 99.91% c are going to be observable for a longer period of time due to the Lorentz factor, but is that the sole benefit of this massive energy upgrade? Anyone have recommended reading for me?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/lhc-sets-new-energy-record-full-power-still-year-away.ars [arstechnica.com]
The lowest energy supersymmetric particles are expect to reside in the 1TeV range, which is just barely in the detectable range of the Tevatron and the current LHC operating energy. But, to observe these particles, the LHC would have to stay at that energy for some time—of the order of many months—to generate a statistically significant sample of collisions.
Instead, the plan is to continue to inc
Re:Question about particle accelerators (Score:5, Informative)
(at relativistic speeds I seem to recall it isn't as simple as E=mc^2, but that's the gist of it).
If a particle is really heavy, a low-energy particle accelerator is highly unlikely (basically never) going to find it. This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist.
In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight. Because we haven't yet found it in our most powerful accelerators, it stands to reason that it is at least more heavy (i.e., more energetic) than 1-2 TeV. Most, but not all, physicists believe the LHC, at 7 TeV, should be energetic enough to find the Higgs boson - if what we think we know about it and particle physics is all correct.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight.
According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], if the standard model is correct, there i 95% confidentiality that the lower bound is 170GeV and the upper is 186GeV
Re:Question about particle accelerators (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Question about particle accelerators (Score:5, Informative)
To create a particle like the Higgs boson, the collision energy needs to at least equal the mass of the particle you're trying to create. The higher energy collisions in the LHC increase the odds of finding the Higgs because of this. THe mass of the Higgs isn't known. However, the more collisions we do at higher energies, the thinner the range of masses the Higgs can be.
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Mass, not time (Score:5, Funny)
Let me honor /. tradition and use a car analogy here:
If you smash 2 GM Metros together, you CANNOT put together 2 Grand Marquis from the debris - there just isn't enough metal.
However, if you smash 2 Peterbuilts together, you can, at least in theory, put together 2 Grand Marquis from that debris - there's enough metal.
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When you smash particles together, there has to be enough mass-energy (enough metal) to form the particles you are looking for, or they won't appear. Mass is energy, energy is mass, speed is kinetic energy, and thus mass.
The Higgs is somewhere north of 1TeV - how much north of that varies from theory to theory. If the Higgs is a Grand Marquis, right now, the Tevatron and the LHC are smashing together Tauruses. Soon, the LHC will be up to stretch limos. At full power, the LHC will be at the Hummer3 level.
And cosmic rays are at the freight train level, but since that's not happening in the lab, it does no good: what fun is a collision if nobody caught it on video?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So what you're saying is that we could create 2 Grand Marquis if we accelerated 2 mini-Coopers to high enough speeds?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I don't think you could get mini's going fast enough even if you dumped one of them out of a plane. I seem to remember something like this on mythbusters.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Let me correct a statement: when I said "The Higgs is somewhere north of 1TeV", what I meant was "the energies needed to form a Higgs within a reasonable period of time are north of 1TeV" - the actual mass is currently thought to be in the low hundreds of GeV.
If the Higgs were actually 1TeV in mass that would REALLY screw up the Standard Model.
(now, there are some theorized particles in the same family as the Higgs that are thought to be 1TeV or more, but....)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, yes, if the paper is moving fast enough, you could. Of course, that would have to be REALLY REALLY fast - assume a sheet of paper to be roughly 100 grams (.1 kg), and a Grand Marquis wet is about 2000kg, the paper would have to be going at least 0.999999999c. Then you'd have to do it a bunch of times before 2 Grand Marquis popped out.
Cheaper to just get the dealer incentives and finance it yourself....
Re:Question about particle accelerators (Score:5, Informative)
> So I understand that more energy means faster moving protons and anti-protons.
> How does this equivocate to finding, say, the Higgs-Boson more easily?
In the quantum world you have to forget about "particles" in the classical sense. There is no spoon.
Think, instead, of a big bag with a bunch of quantities in it. Reach into the bag and you can pull something out, shouting "electron"! The chance that you'll say "electron" and not "proton" is based on what you put into the bag, you can only get out something that meets the conservation laws. So if you put in 0 charge, you might get a neutron out, or an electron and a positron, both have net charge 0.
Which one of those you get depends on the rest of the things you put in, spin, isospin, color, momentum, etc. Chances are you'll get the set of particles that has the lowest energy and still meets the requirements. However, you'll always have a chance of getting the oddballs even if there is a low-energy solution.
The reason for high energies in accelerators is to fill up the bag. That way you can reach in and pull out a single really big particle instead of the bunch of little ones you put into it. If the Higgs really is in the 115 to 180 GeV range, as currently believed, you're going to need to put in a WHOLE LOT of energy so you have a lot left over. And even then, you're going to have to try a WHOLE LOT of times before you're going to see it. It's all statistics at that point.
> Anyone have recommended reading for me?
Yes, "The Great Design: Particles, Fields, and Creation". A bit low-rent, but does cover the topics.
Maury
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
>Thanks for the response! Not to sound like a 3 year old, but why? Wouldn't length contraction cancel out the effects of time dilation?
Don't know about you, but I'll be pretty happy and surprised if my nephew is going to ask similar questions when he turns 3.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also with particle accelerators it is very much the energy of the collision that matters, as the particles velocity increases pushing it with more energy actual
There's something very important (Score:3, Funny)
I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the streams... It would be bad...
No Science? (Score:4, Funny)
They say that no science has been done yet, but now we know that 1.18 TeV is below the energy level at which higgs bosons travel back in time to disrupt supercollider experiments.
(Yes, I'm kidding.)
1.18 billion volts... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Later, Atomm was seen driving off in his SUV, looking smug that he had put those damned scientists in their place.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
7 trillion eV is really, really small.
That's actually eV/particle, so total energy depends on the number of particles at that energy.
Re:Greenhouse Gases (Score:4, Informative)
You've got to keep in mind that this is the energy PER PARTICLE. For reference, 1 gram of matter has something like 10^23 nucleons.
In particle physics, a trillion electron volts is absolutely HUMONGOUS. It is 500 times the energy you get from neutron-antineutron annihilation.
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Re:Greenhouse Gases (Score:4, Informative)
"You can grab an electric fence designed for cattle and get more of a shock [due to several quintillion electrons travelling through your body]."
I don't get it. Are you somehow under the impression that there is a single particle (or one in each direction) circulating in the LHC with an energy of 1 TeV (or thereabouts)? Or perhaps you think that the the total energy of the LHC beam is 1 TeV?
Neither of these is true. Each particle in this beam has an energy of 1 TeV and there are lots of particles. To go back to the light bulb comparison, the LHC is quite a lot brighter than a lightbulb (in terms of particles per second) and each one of the particles in it's beam is a hell of a lot more energetic than the photons spewed out by that lightbulb.
Let's take a look at your electric fence. The maximum output of an electric fence is apparently limited to 5 Joules.
Compare to the LHC. According to this CERN page [web.cern.ch], at full power each beam has a total energy of about 362 MJ, and there are two of them. Some illustrative comparisons from the same page:
1) The kinetic energy of a British aircraft carrier going 11.7 knots (or an American supercarrier going 5.6 knots (*2 for both beams)
2) A Subaru + driver going 1712 km/h (*2 for both beams)
3) Both beams together can melt almost one tonne of copper
4) A high speed train going 150 km/h (* 2 for both beams)
5) 77.4 kg of TNT (*2)
So yeah, quite a bit of energy. I'd much rather take the little tingle from an electric fence as opposed to standing in front of a train going 150 km/h or a car going mach 2.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that a French billion or an American billion?
Re:Translation into sensible units (Score:4, Informative)
1 billion electron volts = 1.6*10^-10 Joules/particle
1 trillion electron volts = 1.6*10^-7 Joules/particle.
The energy of each individual particle is tiny by comparison with things that most people encounter but there are trillions of them whizzing around the LHC its self and that adds up quickly.
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Re:Translation into sensible units (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Translation into sensible units (Score:5, Informative)
I am surprised that no one pointed this out yet, but eV is a unit of energy; it is the energy of one electron accelerated across one Volt. So the relevant equation here is Power = Energy/Time. Thus the real equation is:
energy (Energy) * flux (# of particles / time)
However, as current is, essentially, a charge flux, the particle flux is:
current (Charge/time) / particle_charge (Charge)
However, you ended up with the right answer because the particle_charge term you neglected is equal to the one you neglected in the energy term (E=charge*Volts) namely the elementary charge. So to write the whole thing out:
energy * current / particle_charge
(elementary_charge * voltage) * current / particle_charge
When particle_charge==elementary_charge:
voltage * current
It's a little pedantic, but it is important to note that eV != V, and also that if they accelerate something other than protons or electrons, then your simplistic calculation would be wrong (through at that point Amps is a somewhat ambiguous/improper measurement and probably wouldn't be given anyway).
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Re:but where (Score:5, Insightful)
Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.
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Re:but where (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:but where (Score:4, Informative)
there you go
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