First Collisions At the LHC 256
An anonymous reader writes "At 1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, the first protons collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider. These first collisions, recorded by the LHC experiments, mark the start of the LHC's research program."
First events (Score:5, Informative)
One of the first events seen in Atlas:
http://imgur.com/ugwnl.png [imgur.com]
and in CMS:
http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/events/snapshotA.png [cmsdoc.cern.ch]
Resources (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not "strangelets"? (Score:3, Informative)
Strangelets are hypothetical, nobody has ever seen, so they might not exist at all. LHC is less likely to produce strangelets than RHIC, but I can't read the paper to see why, but it has something to do with the different nature of the collisions. The energies are too low for production of micro black holes, though.
Re:We hit 7 TeV, but how much more to go? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing is equivalent to the "big bang". The "big bang" is a singularity. 14TeV isn't even equivalent to some of the natural collisions that happen in the upper atmosphere.
Re:This may be the biggest experiment of all (Score:5, Informative)
It's turtles all the way down.
Re:First events (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the Atlas official plots:
http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/public/EVTDISPLAY/events.html [web.cern.ch]
CMS:
http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/Media/Images/EventDisplays/7_0TeVCollisions/index.html [web.cern.ch]
LHCb:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1255400 [cdsweb.cern.ch]
Alice:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1255398?ln=en [cdsweb.cern.ch]
and finally all the CERN public photos:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20First%20Physics%20Photos [cdsweb.cern.ch]
Re:Resources (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We hit 7 TeV, but how much more to go? (Score:5, Informative)
There isn't really a limit. You just get closer and closer to t=0.
The big bang timeline goes roughly (listing the time when the mentioned period _ends_):
10^-43 seconds - Planck epoch - this is where we need string theory etc. The universe is expanding really really really fast. Frigging fast. This is called 'inflation'
10^-36 seconds - Grand unification epoch - this is where gravity starts to become seperate from the other forces
10^-12 seconds - The really-really-really-frigging-fast inflation is now over. We've now just got the normal expansion.
--- WE ARE HERE WITH THE LHC ---
10^-6 seconds - Higgs particles are now able to give particles mass. But too hot for quarks to combine into protons etc.
1 second - Quarks have now formed into protons etc
10 seconds - anti-matter is now annihalted somehow. All the protons etc have been created.
20 minutes - Hydrogen etc is formed. We now have real atoms! (Nucleosynthesis)