This is awesome.
A Lego model of the Large Hadron Collider.
Shutting Off the Large Hadron Collider
How particle beams are brought to a safe haltEngineers at particle accelerators must be able to halt intense beams of particles during routine shut-downs or emergencies. At the Large Hadron Collider researchers have devised an elaborate off-ramp procedure able to bring beams of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light to a dead halt in a fraction of a second. The beams carry enough energy to melt a ton of copper.
At LHC, the “road” the beams travel is a sixteen-mile ring-shaped tunnel, and the off-ramp looks like an immense pencil — it’s a piece of graphite about three feet wide, 26 feet long, wrapped with steel, water cooled, and encased in concrete. The difficulty of stopping the proton beam isn’t the large number of protons involved, a hundred trillion or more at any moment. That sounds like a lot, but all those protons wouldn’t be enough to inflate a basketball.
Rather, the difficulty lies in the amount of energy in the protons. When the machine achieves full operation the energy of the protons will be about 360 mega-joules, equivalent to the energy of an aircraft carrier moving through the ocean at a speed of 20 knots. And all that energy is concentrated in a beam that’s thinner than a frail bit of thread.
The protons in the beams race around the LHC machine many thousands of times per second. When the machine is to be turned off the beam can be siphoned off, bunch by bunch, and shot sequentially into the graphite dump. The bunches are aimed so that they don’t all hit the graphite at the same place. This prevents a meltdown of the dump.
Source: InsideScience.org
LHC smashes beam collision record
BBC-Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have moved a step closer to their aim of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe.
The world’s highest-energy particle accelerator has produced a record-breaking particle collision rate - about double the previous rate.
The collider is now generating around 10,000 particle collisions per second, according to physicist Andrei Golutvin.
The LHC is housed in a 27km circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.
The vast machine is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), based near Geneva in Switzerland.
Physicists say this marks the start of turning the LHC into the world’s most powerful particle collider.
“It’s clear that the LHC is the new boy in town, but in two years running we’re going to put Fermilab out of business,” operation group leader Mike Lamont told BBC News.
The Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, USA, is the LHC’s rival. It has operated at higher intensities, but the current collision rate is a record for Cern.
Large Hadron Collider. It has got to be the work of a genius.
Come 2012, I’ll be prepared cause I played Half Life 2!
The beauty quark lives up to its name.
I am kind of obsessed with the LHC.
This morning ZDNet is reporting that the first particle has been detected in a Large Hadron Collider experiment that hopes to shed light on the nature of interactions between matter and antimatter.
LHCb — an experiment set up to explore what happened in the moments immediately after the Big Bang — on Wednesday found a particle called a beauty or bottom quark. Cern scientists have a wishlist of particles they want to measure in the experiment, and the beauty quark is the first on the list that they have found.
The detection is a step on the road to the possible discovery of new particles or interactions between particles, said Cern physicist Christine Sutton. Beauty particles were first discovered in 1977.
“This is like the first cake off the production line,” Sutton told ZDNet UK on Thursday.”Being able to identify particles you know and love is important, as it demonstrates how well your experiment is working. It gives you a sound foundation when you say you think you’ve found something new.”
