CERN announces new start-up schedule for world's most powerful particle accelerator
Offline Public release date: 22-Jun-2007
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This release is available in French.
Geneva, 22 June 2007 -- Speaking at the 142nd session of the CERN Council today, the Organization’s Director General Robert Aymar announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start up in May 2008, taking the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier. A low-energy run originally scheduled for this year has been dropped as the result of a number of minor delays accumulated over the final months of LHC installation and commissioning, coupled with the failure in March of a pressure test in one of the machine’s components.
The LHC is a scientific instrument of unprecedented complexity, and at 27 kilometres in circumference, the world’s largest superconducting installation. Cooling the first sector of the machine to a temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3°C), colder than outer space, began earlier this year and has provided an important learning process. The first sector cool down has taken longer than scheduled, but has allowed the LHC’s operations team to iron out teething troubles and gain experience that will be applied to the machine’s seven remaining sectors. Now cold, tests on powering up the sector have begun and the cool down of a second sector will soon be underway.
In March, a magnet assembly known as the inner triplet, provided to CERN as part of the contribution of the US to the LHC project, failed a pressure test. A repair has been identified and is currently being implemented.
“The low-energy run at the end of this year was extremely tight due to a number of small delays, but the inner triplet problem now makes it impossible,” said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans. “We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go.” The new schedule foresees successively cooling and powering each of the LHC’s sectors in turn this year. Throughout the winter, hardware commissioning will continue, allowing the LHC to be ready for high-energy running by the time CERN’s accelerators are switched on in the spring. Commissioning a new particle accelerator is a complex task. Beams will be injected at low energy and low intensity to give the operations team experience in driving the new machine. Intensity and energy will then slowly be increased.
“There’s no big red button when you’re starting up a new accelerator,” said Evans, “but we aim to be seeing high energy collisions by the summer.” Installation of the large and equally innovative apparatus for experiments at this new and unique facility will continue at the same time. This huge effort will be completed on a schedule consistent with that of the accelerator.
In another important development, the CERN Council agreed to increase CERN’s funding over the years 2008-2011 as an important first step towards implementing the decisions Council made in July 2006 for a European strategy for particle physics.
“This is an important vote for the future of particle physics in Europe,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, “it allows us to consolidate the laboratory’s infrastructure, prepare for future upgrades of the LHC and to re-launch a programme of R&D for the long-term future.”
The LHC relies on a chain of particle accelerators, the oldest of which was constructed in the 1950s. Their successful operation is essential to the smooth running of the LHC. These additional resources will be used to consolidate CERN’s infrastructure, and build on it for the future.
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This is great! For some reason I thought they were shooting for November of this year, but that may have been prior to the malfunction.
Good news on the vote, too!!
They were actually shooting for earlier this year, then the problems with magnets occured and they pushed back the date until November. Now they have had to push it back even further.
Not so great news...
Ok, Mr. Impatience, it is good news as far as I am concerned! LOL
They are still moving forward and the vote to continue funding is good.
Yes, I must admit I am a little impatient to see the results once this facility goes online.
...and yes, the extended funding is good news.
Few more days till the first beam... Anyone excited as I am?
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
I'm more excited about the fact that once more fundies will look the fool when the world doesn't end.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists. Books by Rook Hawkins (Thomas Verenna)
Google "black hole and particle accelerator" ... Some fun reading,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=black+hole+and+particle+accelerator+&btnG=Google+Search
Doomsday??? "Scientists in Geneva are readying the largest particle accelerator ever built. But BPP regular David Morgan says at least two men are suing to stop the accelerator because they fear it will swallow all of planet Earth." 12 min podcast,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89265915
Umm, and stem cell research is sinful .... and some abrahamic god is mad at us!
Atheism Books.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Yeah Jill, and a nice fat joint, good beer, and the blessing of fine rum.
Forgot music, from metal to the classics, Chopin to Pantera. Couldn't find my favorite Tony, but you get the idea. "Born Free", and "Moon River" as sung by Andy, and so many others. Oh, and Tony singing "Country Girl", and "Sunny Side of the Street" ....
Old fucks now, sample, groovy Tony Bennett and Andy Williams, City Medley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoV0q_q6VCk
Even Elton John sang "Moon River". Oh, that Peggy, moms favorite ...
"Is That All There Is" by Peggy Lee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTpFUT-lxls
Music can Save !
Atheism Books.
WOOT! And so it begins. It upsets me that I work with scientists, admittedly chemists, and i'm the only one excited by this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7604293.stm
M
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Spotty feed. I watched until they got the first set of corrections for the oscillation done.
http://webcast.cern.ch/
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
friend of mine sent this to me today, this is something that is probly going round on the fundie sites and is probly helping to fuel the irrationality of the fundies >_>
http://lhccam.com/
It is scary how gullible people are. I had a co worker who actually believed that by smashing the atoms together that somehow it would suck the entire universe into a black hole.
I quelled that by simply saying, the difference between smashing two atoms together would be like throwing a grain of sand in the ocean, hardly consiquential.
The density and intense gravity that exists in a black hole is not held by two atoms. The two are completly dissimilar.
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That is, indeed, a comforting way to look at it, Brian, but not entirely accurate.
The density and gravity of a singularity is infinite regardless of it's size, the thing about the gravity of black holes is that it is confined to a boundary and the likelihood of sufficient mass (to pose any danger) reaching that boundary under these circumstances is extremely low.
What's more important to remember about these end of world scenarios like Black Holes is that the likelihood of the LHC actually creating a black hole is also very low to begin with, moreover, there is strong likelihood that the radius in which the gravity is confined is thermally ambient and that is where the size of originally collided particles really comes into play, because we, of course, are talking about a totally teensy bit of matter here, so small it would just puff out almost instantaneously.
And last but not least, again to the chance of black holes actually being created, the fact is that the LHC isn't going to create collisions at the right energy scale for black holes unless there are extra dimensions of significant size which is to say they will be black holes from a higher dimensional family the likes of torodial rings and such so you can forget what you think you know about 4d black holes in suggesting what might become of them.
So to sum it up, the most comforting reality is that the LHC isn't necessarily capable of producing anything dangerous at all, and the second comforting thing is that in the slim chance that something of spectacular kind was produced the then much much slimmer chance that it could become a threat to anything outside of its confinement doesn't actually add up with the chance of black holes being created. The catastrophic scenarios just don't sum to a significantly real chance and this is why physicists sleep perfectly well in the knowledge that CERN is going ahead with the experiment.
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Eloise, what do you mean by "thermally ambient" here?
I was starting to get the feeling that I was beginning to wrap my head (partly) around what these little black holes might be capable of.
Here's about where I was at in my thinking:
From what I've read here and elsewhere, I thought that in the unlikely event that one of these black holes was created due to matter being collided with sufficient force to produce a ridiculously high density (infinite?) in a small volume of space, which would then have infinite gravity within its event horizon, that event horizon would be so small that it wouldn't be able to effect any matter other than that which is already in the singularity. Then I was thinking that it would likely be Hawking Radiation that would cause it to evaporate.
However, I think I've seen it mentioned that just the forces/heat involved with colliding the particles together should be enough to evaporate the black hole, is that right?
And now you throw thermal ambience at me...
Er, sorry, it was getting really late when I wrote it, that probably should have said radiant or radiating to avoid complicating the point.
The infinite density isn't produced by the force of the collision, but by gravitational collapse. If the force of the collision squeezes the particles into a critical density then at that point strong gravity would take over and collapse it toward singularity.
You're right, a black hole in this scenario is evidently more likely to evaporate quickly due to it's quantum ruled size, isolation and the extra dimensionality.
Well rest assured I meant ambience only to refer offhandedly to Hawking radiation, sorry for the poor use of language, I shouldn't type so late, the skin of the black hole is ambient, ie it has a temperature, and what has a temperature radiates heat which is equal to losing energy therefore equal to losing mass. And yeah the heat involved in the collision does increase the likelyhood of evaporation as you've said, there would be a lot of concentrated heat in the process which entails more jitter which in turn equals more rapid heat loss this is all surrounded by plenty of space for the radiant heat to escape into quickly.
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You know how much I hate abuse of terminology. Evaporation is a process involved in the establishment of vapor phase equilibria on the surface of a liquid. It can be viewed as the "forward reaction" in the phase equilibria of molecules on the surface of a liquid. It has nothing to do with black holes.
It may sound minor, but such abuses of terminology are precisely how this scare began in the first place.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Indeed I do! Sorry about that.
I was just reading how Hawking himself describes it in "The Universe in a Nutshell" and, unless there's another reference to it somewhere else in the book, he just says he thinks the most likely scenario would be that the black hole would 'disappear'. So I guess that would be the right terminology in this case?
No, fair enough.
That's what I said!
Well, what weighs more. A ton of bricks or a ton of feathers? I understood what you said.
Two atoms do not contain all the density of the universe by themselves .
"A teensy bit of mater", is what my metaphor was trying to convey. It would be the difference between lighting off a firecracker vs an H-bomb.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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All the mater in the universe at one time was in an extreemly small dense point. My point is that no individual componants of that point add up to all the other componants.
Much like a pop up tent. The tent when erect looks large, but can be folded to be compact. BUT, you cannot equate the rod that holds it up to being the entire tent. That is why I was saying that two atoms do not equate to all the atoms in the universe, even if they can be "compacted".
And by extention that would include sub-atomic particals. One partical is not at the same time all the other particals. And this comming from someone who barely passed physics.
I am a human, but that doesn't make me Arnold Swartzenager by default simple because I am human. I am much smaller to scale by ratio.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
I think you mean two atoms do not contain all the mass of the universe, because two atoms can indeed have the same density as the big bang. The distinction between mass and density is important here. Density(rho) = mass/volume so you can see that to get the density of a mass you have to divide it by the volume it is within, squeezing a very small mass into an even smaller volume increases the density of the system and a gravitational collapse pushes an amount of mass in volume tending to zero towards infinite; as far as we know a gravitational collapse can't be stopped so black holes make sense to a point - although we're without recourse to make much more sense of them beyond that point.
Well, no, an explosion is not a great analogy in this case cause it's a little bit misleading. If you packed the force of a H-bomb into a firecracker the explosion would affect the same radius as a H-bomb and this is not so with singularities where the same force is present regardless of the area it can interact with.
A mini black hole packs the same punch as a massive black hole and the same punch as a fridge sized black hole, if you "touched" a teensy LHC black hole (assuming it were possible to do so) you'd still be spaghettified, the way that the size matters is that the gravitational collapse would occur within a radius too small to interact with familiar matter, not that the actual black hole possesses any weaker a force because of it's size, it's a subtle but important difference.
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