The LHC is kindly livestreaming the power-ups, beam alignment and first runs of the LHC - and you can watch from the CMS, ALICE, LHCb or ATLAS (plus the main feed) at the LHC First Physics web site: http://bit.ly/dBhPNq
Tags: collision mode, lhc, power up
LHC being spooled up right now! The Guardian has the details [liveblog]
0 comments at Tuesday, March 30, 2010It's finally getting given a few more beans... From the Grauniad:
Large Hadron Collider – Live!
The waiting is over. The world's largest, most powerful particle accelerator goes into action this morning. The hunt for new particles, forces and dimensions starts here.The G has a liveblog on their web site which you can set to update every minute.
Tags: guardian, half power, lhc, power up, restart
CERN keeps an up-to-date minisite on various LHC commissioning-related news. Alongside, you can find the full proposed 2010 schedule (warning: PDF) for the beast's activities. They also host a page showing Latest News, blow by blow on a weekly basis.
Well, at least this means the Olympics will pass without being sucked into a black hole ;)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director.
Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years.
The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts. But joints between the machine's magnets must be strengthened before higher-energy collisions can commence. The Geneva-based machine only recently restarted after being out of action for 14 months following an accident in September 2008.
Dr Myers said, "It's something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error. The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits. You don't hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other areas that have gone incredibly well."
"With a machine like the LHC, you only build one and you only build it once."
Apparently the problem likes with the superconducting joints' copper sheaths - designed to take up the current load if one of the magnets begins to warm up (which is comforting that they're bothering to ensure they work properly, at least, given that at peak the LHC can chomp through 50MW of the good stuff). At peak, the LHC is designed to smash atoms together using 14TeV of power, although it can run on a reduced (!) 7TeV - which scientists can use to look further into the nature of dark matter, so it's not just sitting idle in the meantime. Good stuff.
Tags: downtime, half power, lhc, outage, repairs
However, not as the Large Hadron Collider... It'll ramp up from an initial restart at roughly half capacity:
The troubled Large Hadron Collider, which blew out part of its cooling system when scientists turned it on for the first time last September, is now set to restart in November, but as the Midsize Hadron Collider. Initially, it will smash protons together at only half the energy level it was designed for — still powerful enough that it could produce some exotic findings....
The world's most powerful particle smasher will restart in November at just half the energy the machine was designed to reach. But even at this level, the Large Hadron Collider has the potential to uncover exotic new physics, such as signs of hidden extra dimensions, physicists say. The LHC is a new particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, designed to answer fundamental questions, such as what gives elementary particles their mass, by colliding particles at higher energies than ever achieved in a laboratory before. But the first attempt to turn on the LHC failed in September 2008 when a joint connecting a pair of superconducting wires overheated, causing an explosive release of helium used as a coolant. Scientists have been making repairs and checking the strength of other electrical connections since then to pave the way for a second start attempt.
Now, CERN has announced that the LHC's first data collecting run, to begin in November, will collide protons at only half the energy the accelerator was designed to achieve. The run will initially smash protons together at 7 trillion electron volts (7 TeV), compared to the design goal of 14 TeV, according to a CERN statement on 6 August. (Protons in each of the two opposing beams will have 3.5 TeV of energy, producing collisions at 7 TeV.)
Never mind, at least we're getting somewhere once again! Read the full article on the NewScientist site: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17566-large-hadron-collider-to-restart-at-half-its-designed-energy.html. Also, make sure you're signed up to LHC@Home and are part of the ITU@LHC team for when the new results start coming in! :)
