Team ITU@LHC's Official Blog

LHC main event happening right now, watch on CERN livestream

2010-03-30T12:00:00.000+01:00

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

LHC being spooled up right now! The Guardian has the details [liveblog]

2010-03-30T11:24:00.000+01:00

It'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.

Keep on schedule with the LHC - from the CERN web site

2010-03-23T00:17:00.000Z

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.

LHC to shut down... again... in 2012

2010-03-22T23:51:00.000Z

Well, at least this means the Olympics will pass without being sucked into a black hole ;)

The Beeb reports:

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.

Newsbite: LHC on schedule for November restart

2009-08-12T01:21:00.001+01:00

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! :)

What's been going on with the LHC? A recap

2009-04-17T00:26:00.001+01:00

This blog's been lying dormant (very much like the LHC) since its initial beam-on last year. After the media frenzy surrounding the first successful tests on Beam On Day, the LHC has suffered setbacks and months of repairs to bring it back to operational status. Let's recap the timeline thus far:

2008...

10th of September, 2008: LHC's first beam on event (press release)
20th of September, 2008: "event" in sector 3-4 (press release)
21st of October, 2008: LHC officially inaugurated (press release)
3rd of October, 2008: LHC World Computing Grid officially crunches first data (press release)
16th of October, 2008: CERN releases official report on September incident (press release)

2009...

9th of February, 2009: CERN confirms the new restart date for the LHC (press release)

CERN has confirmed that the LHC will now restart in September 2009, with a brief technical stop during Christmas. This means that CERN will have full results to crunch in the opening months of 2010, and the timescale also makes provisions for the collisions of lead ions for further study as well. From the press release;

In Chamonix there was consensus among all the technical specialists that
the new schedule is tight but realistic.

“The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for
the physicists waiting for data,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “It is
cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we
start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year.”
This new schedule represents a delay of six weeks with respect to the previous schedule, which foresaw the LHC “cold at the beginning of July”. The cause of this delay is due to several factors such as implementation of a new enhanced protection system for the busbar and magnet splices; installation of new pressure-relief valves to reduce the collateral damage in case of a repeat incident; application of more stringent safety constraints; and scheduling constraints associated with helium transfer and storage.
The enhanced protection system measures the electrical resistance in the cable joints (splices) and is much more sensitive than the system existing on 19 September.
The new pressure relief system has been designed in two phases. The first phase involves installation of relief valves on existing vacuum ports in the whole ring. Calculations have shown that in an incident similar to that of 19 September, the collateral damage would be minor with this first phase. The second phase involves adding additional relief valves on all the dipole magnets and would guarantee minor collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) in all worst cases over the life of the LHC.
The management has decided for 2009 to install the additional relief valves on four of the LHC’s eight sectors, at the same time as repairs in the sector damaged last September and other consolidation work already foreseen. The dipoles in the remaining four sectors will be equipped in 2010.

Engineers working on the LHC accelerator and magnets in Sector 3-4

Stay tuned for more updates, info and tidbits on CERN and the LHC...

Live LHC CMS webca-... wait... oh n- --- - - [DISCONNECT]

2008-09-13T03:19:00.001+01:00

Yes, it was inevitable. The 'real' LHC webcams.

Back to reality - as we all know by now, the initial LHC beam on was a success, with collisions to follow in due course after the final set of refinements are made to the machine. Then, hopefully, the data starts pouring in for the world to analyse!

To satiate your curiosity in the meantime, you could do some reading around the subject:

The CERN Large Hadron Collider: Accelerator and Experiments
http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.lhc/jinst

On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics
http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.4268

There's also lots (and I mean LOTS) of First Day media on the CERN site:

http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20First%20Beam%20Photos
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20First%20Beam

CERN's Central Document Server also has a growing archive of all LHC-related experiments at http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20Experiments?ln=en, also including notes, papers and theses on the technology, concepts and experiments to be conducted. There's a video highlights package of the First Beam day on the LHC First Beam minisite (the direct link: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1125916).

For those who can't get enough of the video goodness, CERN also have a raft of video footage, B-roll and interviews with key members of the LHC project on their CDSWeb in the videos section, all streamable or downloadable. Check them out here.

And if you've not already installed BOINC, http://lhc.intotheunknown.co.uk/2008/09/lhc-and-us-going-into-unknown-together.html and joined the LHC@ITU team... Well, go do it!

Oh, and there's some real LHC webcams here and here - and while I'm at it, here's some more:

More goodies coming soon!

What is the Large Hadron Collider? Auntie explains...

2008-09-10T05:15:00.000+01:00

The BBC is giving massive amounts of coverage to a certain landmark event, and if you are in any doubt as to elements of the LHC or the project as a whole - fear not! The Beeb have published an exhaustingly comprehensive guide to the LHC, and you can check it out on the BBC News web site.

And don't forget, the beam on will be broadcast live on the CERN site tomorrow. Best get some sleep before the start!

The LHC and us, going into the unknown together... Join in!

2008-09-09T20:49:00.001+01:00

In case you haven't heard, CERN is flicking the switch (as such) tomorrow morning (8:30pm UK time) on the Large Hadron Collider, marking the culmination of over twenty years' hard slog and amazing technological development.

One side-effect of all the particle smashing is the ongoing data collected and analysed by the experiment... and the sheer volume of it is astounding; an estimated 44,000 Gigabytes of data are expected to be generated each day (approximately 43 Terabytes), and approximately 15 Petabytes each year.

So, who analyses all this data? Obviously, no one organisation could possibly ever analyse all of this data. CERN has already established the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid;

The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the “Tier-0” centre of LCG. After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid.

The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks. Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

There's a video explaining the complexities of the Computing Grid available from the CERN site. In GridPP, the UK collaborative effort, 17 individual institutions are currently collaborating to analyse a portion of the results - contributing an equivalent of 10,000 PCs' worth of CPU cycles towards uncovering the secrets of the universe... Including, just possibly, the Higgs Boson.

However, these academic institutions can't handle everything - even with similar arrangements worldwide. CERN realised this a fair while ago, and has partnered with Berkeley's Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing (BOINC), to create the LHC@home project. Just like other projects such as Folding@Home and SETI@Home, LHC@home will harness the combined power of millions of peoples' computers to process small chunks of data in one of the largest computing grids in the world.

The best thing? We can all be a part of it. All you need is a copy of the BOINC software installed on your computer; join the project (full instructions are available on the LHC@home Installation page, but there are only a couple of steps you need to perform) and then join the ITU@LHC team!