How the Moon Affects LHC Operations 64
New submitter NervousWreck writes "Physicists report that tidal conditions are affecting the hardware at the LHC. 'This effect has been known since the LEP days, the Large Electron Positron collider, the LHC predecessor. The LHC reuses the same circular tunnel as LEP. Twenty some years ago, it then came as a surprise that, given the 27 km circumference of the accelerator, the gravitational force exerted by the moon on one side is not the same as the one felt at the opposite side, creating a small distortion of the tunnel. Since the moon’s effect is very small, only large bodies like oceans feel its effect in the form of tides. But the LHC is such a sensitive apparatus, it can detect the minute deformations created by the small differences in the gravitational force across its diameter.'"
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
They also had problems with an intermittent "rogue signals" which later turned out to match the timetable of a nearby railway. I wonder whether it could, in theory at least, detect gravity waves?
Not without much more sensitive equipment. Projects like LIGO that look for gravity waves have 4km long tunnels that they use for laser interferometry. That gives them much more sensitivity than the LHC can dream of having with it's setup and electronics.
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
[1] Coincidentally, I found out about this as part of the whole issue over neutrinos supposedly travelling faster than light, which was finally given the official "no they don't" [web.cern.ch] by CERN today.
The Quantum Diaries (Score:3, Informative)
On a side note, there's a write up of what was talked about the the Neutrino Conference that happened last week. Even aside from faster than light travel, they are finding some very [quantumdiaries.org] weird [quantumdiaries.org] things [quantumdiaries.org]
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
The LHC is 27KM times the number of times an beam has to be accelerated.