LHC To Start Back Up In November At Half Power

mcgrew writes to mention that the Large Hadron Collider, smasher of particles, will get another chance to prove itself this November. The restart will begin with tests at half power, a mere 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), and ramp up slowly to the designed goal of 14 TeV. "Measurements indicate that some of the electrical connections could not safely handle the amount of current needed to run at the full 14 TeV, so will need to be replaced before dialing up the energy that far. But even 7 TeV is much higher than physicists have ever probed in the laboratory before. The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is the current record holder, with collisions at 2 TeV."

Re:Only half

[Anonymous Coward]

Two opposing beams travelling at near the speed of light collide. Yet they don't collide at near twice the speed of light. The LHC is destroying my brain.

Re:Only half

[TheGeniusIsOut]

It is actually fairly simple relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another, the slower its time reference to the other is. Even though relative to each other from an outside viewpoint they seem to be travelling passed each other at greater than the speed of light, Each experiences a time dialation relative to mass and velocity, so in the frame of reference where the particles collide, they are moving much slower than the speed of light due to time taking longer. When the collision occurs, velocity is mostly cancelled out relative to the surrounding environment, and all of the energy that was contained in the high-speed sub-atomic particles is released in a cloud of elementary particles, which recombine into new and interesting matter. It is out of this cloud that the quark-gluon plasma is formed, which in turn is theoretically capable of forming quantum singularities at high enough energy densities. The faster you can get a particle moving, the higher its energy level is, the higher the density of energy will be at moment of collision.