Proton Beams Are on Track at Collider

[Moonandstar 6]

If we get the Grand Unified Theory, we could time travel! Do whatever we want! I really like that!

Arm phaser banks and photon proton torpedoes, dammit!

[Amby 490]

I read this and decided I'm not geeky enough to make any sort of meaningful comment. Physics is not my thing. Continue without me

[mawilson 2,133]

I read this and decided I'm not geeky enough to make any sort of meaningful comment. Physics is not my thing. Continue without me

What, not even my comment?

[Amby 490]

What, not even my comment?

oh...hmmm...I had one but I don't want it to come true

[scandal 951]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/science/06collide.html

Hadron Collider Set for Half Power

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: February 5, 2010

The world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally rumble into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years and then shut down for a yearlong repair session, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said this week.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was built over 15 years and at a cost of $9 billion to bang protons together in a search for primordial forces and new laws of physics. But the project has been plagued with problems.

As a result, CERN’s engineers and scientists decided in a meeting in Chamonix, France, this week to play it safe and operate the collider at only 3.5 trillion electron volts, or TeV, the energy unit of choice in particle physics, for the next 18 to 24 months.

The machine, which has been in a winter shutdown since December, will be started up again around Feb. 20, CERN said, and should reach its operating power in March.

The collider will not shut down for repairs next winter as originally planned, but in 2012. It will start up again in 2013.

Officials said the collider would still take a planned monthlong break from colliding protons this fall. During that time, it will collide lead ions in an attempt to produce a so-called quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed just after the Big Bang.

[Niels Bohr 72]

gluons are what hold the proton and neutrons together....i wonder what they're after, really

[scandal 951]

kXy5EvYu3fw

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233667
Sharon Begley
Quark Soup

Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.
Feb 16, 2010

While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot—4 trillion degrees Celsius—that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.

The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers—or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.

The behavior that has most intrigued the scientists so far is something called broken symmetry (of which there is a nice video here. Within the quark soup appear "bubbles" that violate a principle of physics called mirror symmetry, or parity. This form of symmetry means that events—in this case, the collisions of particles and the spray of subatomic debris that results—look the same if viewed in a mirror as they do when viewed directly. But one of the detectors monitoring the collisions inside RHIC observed an asymmetry in the electric charges of particles emerging from most of the collisions. Specifically, positively charged quarks seem to prefer to fly out of the collision parallel to the magnetic field, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. This behavior would appear reversed if reflected in a mirror, with negative quarks traveling parallel to the magnetic field and positive quarks traveling in the opposite direction. Hence the violation of mirror symmetry.

The quark soup also seems to contain bubbles that violate another form of symmetry, called charge-parity invariance. According to this bedrock principle of physics, when energy is converted to mass or vice versa as per Einstein's E=mc2, equal numbers of particles and antiparticles—matter and antimatter—are created or annihilated, respectively. That may seem like an abstruse point, but it may hold the key to how structure and form emerged from the otherwise homogeneous quark soup. Such symmetry-violating bubbles in the nascent universe, cosmologists suspect, tipped balance in the sea of otherwise equal amounts of matter and antimatter toward a preference for matter over antimatter. If the amounts of matter and antimatter had remained identical, no one would be here to notice: when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, they go poof in an annihilating burst of energy. By now, almost 14 billion years after creation, every particle of matter would have been destroyed through this process, leaving a universe awash in radiation and nothing else, an ethereally glowing world of light without substance. By re-creating conditions that last existed at the birth of the universe, says Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, who oversees research at RHIC, "RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe."

Previous experiments have found violations of charge-parity symmetry (a 1964 experiment discovering such violations brought the scientists who conducted it a Nobel Prize), but in each case the effect was too small to account for the amount of matter in the universe today. What RHIC found is "consistent with predictions of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of the universe." For a field that has been in the doldrums (especially in the United States) since the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, and that seems plagued by gremlins (as when the Large Hadron Collider sprang a helium leak, particle physics really needed this one. Edited February 17, 2010 by scandal

[scandal 951]

A new record! 3.5TeV, en route to 7!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=lhc-surpasses-its-own-record-as-the-2010-03-19

Mar 19, 2010 05:40 PM in Basic Science | 1 comments

LHC surpasses its own record as the world's most powerful particle accelerator

By John Matson

CERN control roomThe Large Hadron Collider, the so-called big bang machine outside Geneva, has eclipsed its own world record as the highest-energy particle accelerator in history. The collider, commonly known as the LHC, accelerated its twin proton beams to 3.5 trillion electron-volts, or TeV, Friday morning, according to a prepared statement from CERN, the European lab for particle physics that operates the LHC.

In November the collider worked its beams up to 1.18 TeV, breaking the record of 0.98 TeV that had been held by Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois. The following month CERN steered those beams—one clockwise, one counterclockwise—into a head-on smashup with a total energy of 2.36 TeV, the highest-energy collision ever seen.

The objective in ramming such high-energy particles together is to probe their makeup and to observe the shower of particle debris that sprays from the collision. The LHC should be sufficiently powerful to probe the energetic first moments of the universe's evolution after the big bang and may be able to fill in a number of chapters now missing from fundamental physics. Prominently, it could find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that imbues other particles with mass; it might also identify the particle culprit that makes up the mysterious galaxy-shaping stuff known as dark matter.

CERN says it will soon announce a timeline for converging the 3.5-TeV beams, which together will yield another record: a collision at 7 TeV. That will be the LHC's peak collision energy for 18–24 months before the collider shuts down in 2012 for a year of hardware repairs; only after that will CERN fire up the LHC at its design energy of 7 TeV per beam, producing 14-TeV collisions. But given how much physicists have learned from the much weaker Tevatron, even a half-strength LHC may have a chance to open up new realms of physics.

[mawilson 2,133]

There's gonna be another blackout!

[Ban Hammer 13,656]

There's gonna be another blackout!

can we blame the british for it?

[scandal 951]

can we blame the british for it?

CERN is in Switzerland.

But I would blame Australia if anything goes wrong. They're so perfect they should have seen the problems coming before they arise.

Seriously, this is really cool science going on. LHC was considered for so many years to be too expensive, too complex and too unlikely to ever get funding and get off the ground. To see record-breaking energies being achieved is very exciting. We have now the prospect of dramatic new physics as a result (Higgs boson) which could take us a long step towards resolving the major unanswered questions of the past century, since quantum theory was established in the 1920s.

[Ban Hammer 13,656]

CERN is in Switzerland.

But I would blame Australia if anything goes wrong. They're so perfect they should have seen the problems coming before they arise.

Seriously, this is really cool science going on. LHC was considered for so many years to be too expensive, too complex and too unlikely to ever get funding and get off the ground. To see record-breaking energies being achieved is very exciting. We have now the prospect of dramatic new physics as a result (Higgs boson) which could take us a long step towards resolving the major unanswered questions of the past century, since quantum theory was established in the 1920s.

i know it's in switzerland. but i still wanna blame the british.

[scandal 951]

Fermilab gives new challenges a whirl

European collider packs more wallop, but Tevatron still stirs up particle race

By Ted Gregory, Tribune reporter

In a week or so, scientists at a 17-mile underground loop on the Swiss-French border are expected to collide protons at an unprecedented force, about three times the energy applied to protons at Fermilab, the national physics laboratory in Batavia.

It might sound a bit removed from the everyday concerns of a sputtering economy and health care reform, except for one thing: The future of the U.S. global leadership in particle physics may hinge on what happens in that area between Switzerland's Lake Geneva and France's Jura mountains over the next few years.

That has left Fermilab in the somewhat uncomfortable spot of being second banana, a status that has scientific and academic consequences. Yet, it has several projects in development and is pursuing the so-called "God particle" — the Holy Grail of particle physics.

Construction of the Swiss-French loop, known as the Large Hadron Collider, progressed over a decade, and it started working in September 2008 but was shut down when magnets used in the proton acceleration became damaged.

After restarting the LHC in November, scientists in December boosted the energy of its particle beams to 1.18 trillion electron volts — by comparison, a bolt of lightning contains about 1 million electron volts. That new energy level broke the previous world record of .98 trillion electron volts held by Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator. The national laboratory had held that record since 2001.

On Friday, the LHC announced it had broken its own record, boosting its particle beams to 3.5 trillion electron volts.

One consequence of the LHC's start is that about 50 of Fermilab's 300 scientists have moved to the LHC at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In addition, about 26 of the estimated 80 U.S. universities conducting research in this country, many of which were working at Fermi, have switched to the LHC.

"It's a little weird," said Robert Tschirhart, associate head of the Computing Division at Fermilab, "but our business is research. That's what we make. In this business, there are no secrets. In fact, it's against the law."

Scientists at Fermi "very much want" the LHC to succeed, Tschirhart said. A Remote Operations Center was built to allow scientists at Fermi to monitor projects at the LHC and help operate an experiment there.

"If and when they do succeed," Tschirhart said, "everything has to be published, benefitting Fermilab and science in general."

Still, he conceded, "there's definitely competition."

The most obvious competition, and perhaps a final flash of glory for Fermilab's Tevatron, is the race to find a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson. Experts contend the Higgs may give mass to all things, which has led to its nickname, the "God particle."

Fermilab has been pushing vigorously to find the Higgs boson.

"Everyone knows that the really big prize is finding the ‘God particle,'" said Phillip Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. "If Fermilab doesn't do it, LHC probably will."

Beyond that immediate objective, Fermilab is focusing on three other projects designed in part to leapfrog the LHC, Tschirhart and others said. Those center on what Fermilab scientists call the "High Intensity Frontier," which essentially focuses on one of Fermi's strengths — the trillions and trillions of particle collisions it creates every year. The LHC's forte, in at least the near term, is high-energy collisions.

The distinction is one of quantity versus quality, Schewe said. Fermilab is betting somewhat that the quantity of its collisions will lead to groundbreaking discoveries. LHC is emphasizing that the quality of having the highest-energy collisions on Earth will lead to those discoveries.

One of the early stages in pursuing that long-term, "High Intensity Frontier" is Fermilab's Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. The estimated $300 million project would produce a beam of neutrinos — highly elusive, enigmatic particles — and fire them at a detector 800 miles away in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Construction is expected to begin in 2014, Tschirhart said.

Next in line is the science-fiction-sounding Project X, which Tschirhart calls a "proton blowtorch." Project X also would provide the world's most intense proton beams in particle physics, a distinction that could reveal breakthrough physics discoveries far beyond the reach of the LHC.

It also could total $1 billion to build, Tschirhart said. Formal approval of the project is about one year away. Construction could start in 2015, he added.

Overlapping with Project X is the International Linear Collider, also known as the ILC, which Tschirhart described as two long rifles shooting electron "bullets" at each other. Construction would start in 2016 at the earliest, Tschirhart said, and the project could run as much as $10 billion.

"I wouldn't say this is Fermilab's only hope for the future," Schewe said of Project X and the International Linear Collider. "But it's a very important one."

Prospects for Project X and the ILC remain shaky. The critical question, Schewe and others contend, is whether the federal government would be willing to invest the billions of dollars necessary to design and build those facilities.

"Congress provided funding in the past," Schewe said, "but it's not a great time for doing that right now."

In the case of the ILC, it remains unclear whether it will be built at all and, if it is, whether it would be built in the U.S. or near the LHC in Europe. If the ILC is built in the U.S., Fermi likely would be competing with other national labs for the project.

All of that uncertainty generates some anxiety at Fermilab. Tschirhart remains optimistic, as does Fred Dylla, executive director and chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics.

"Fermilab's twilight or demise has been predicted periodically for a long time," Dylla said. "I don't buy it." The scientists there are resourceful in coming up with a "rich mixture" of important experiments, he added.

"The people there are very bright," Dylla said. More important, perhaps, "they've had such a long history of being able to ride out the rise and fall of federal funding."

[scandal 951]

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/03/ask-a-nuclear-physicist-what-exactly-did-the-lhc-do-today.html

Ask a Nuclear Physicist: What Exactly Did the L.H.C. Do Today?

by Juli Weiner

March 30, 2010, 4:45 PM

Today brought the exciting news that Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider “mashed beams of protons together at energies that are 3.5 times higher than previously achieved.” This was joyous news, for some reason! According to the B.B.C., many scientists are describing the event as the onset of “a new era in science” that will allow researchers to understand “why matter has mass.” But what exactly does smashing protons together even prove, and why does it matter? Was that pun intended? And were we really in danger of enveloping the entire planet in a black hole?

To find out, we spoke with VF.com’s go-to scientist, Professor John Parsons of Columbia University, who actually has a hand in L.H.C. goings-on, for another edition of Ask a Nuclear Physicist.

VF Daily: What’s the significance of all of this, in layman’s terms?

Professor Parsons: This is the beginning of the operations phase of the L.H.C., which has started producing proton-proton collisions at a new world record energy, 7 TeV (~3.5X higher than at Fermilab near Chicago, the accelerator which has been the highest until recently). The experiments, which we have been building for close to 20 years, are now starting to record and analyze these collisions, which recreate on a microscopic scale the conditions less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. If there are new types of particles which exist (such as those proposed in supersymmetry),we should be able to create them in the lab and study their properties, hopefully answering some of the mysteries about how the universe began and how it got to be the way we see it today. For example, we know ~25% of the universe is some exotic form of matter that we call “dark matter,” but we don’t know what it is made of. Supersymmetric particles are a leading candidate, but there are also other ideas around.

We hope the L.H.C. will allow us to answer this, and other questions, such as whether there are additional spacetime dimensions in the universe. Since it will take some time to accumulate and study enough data, and to understand our detectors, one should not expect such a discovery next week, but today marks the beginning of a new era in the exploration of the fundamental constituents of the universe, and the role they played in shaping our universe.

VF Daily: Was there really a chance—as some have prophesied—that the experiment would cause a black hole that would instantaneously destroy the planet?

Professor Parsons: Concerning black holes, there are some exotic theories which predict we could create microscopic black holes at the L.H.C. However, if true, these black holes would decay very rapidly and would not pose any danger at all. We know this with certainty because nature produces particles of much higher energies than the L.H.C. (for example, the Earth is continuously bombarded by so-called “cosmic rays” from space which are many powers of ten higher in energy than the protons in the L.H.C.). Therefore, any particles which we can create at the L.H.C. would be created in much larger numbers throughout the universe. It has been estimated that the universe as a whole performs the equivalent of 10 million L.H.C. experiments per second! So, any worries about the creation of potentially dangerous black holes is entirely unfounded.

[scandal 951]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2010/0401/1224267465255.html

The Irish Times - Thursday, April 1, 2010

Think making two bullets collide is difficult? Then try doing it at the subatomic level

After 20 years of planning, building and research, the ‘big bang machine’ – the Hadron Collider at Cern – has begun delivering its promised high energy collisions . So what now? asks ####### AHLSTROM

IMAGINE TWO rifles pointing at each other, a mile apart, and then firing and hitting each other head on. Well that would be easy by comparison with the challenge of getting subatomic particles to strike one another at almost the speed of light in the world’s newest, most powerful collider.

Yet this challenge is just what will occupies physicists and engineers over the coming years at the massive research complex at Cern, Europe’s nuclear research centre. In the process, its LargeB Hadron Collider (LHC) may begin to help solve some of the biggest mysteries of science. The excitement is just settling down in Cern after the momentous news on Tuesday that after 20 years of planning, building and a €4 billion investment, the LHC began delivering high energy collisions.

The four main detectors positioned around the LHC’s 27km-long ring began coping with the first real surge of data from the LHC, recording some 500,000 collision events in the few hours that the machine ran, according to experimenters in the complex.

Cern refers to this start-up phase of the LHC’s operation as its “first physics”, the first delivery of real scientific data. The LHC began circulating beams of particles, protons (hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons), last autumn, but this represented no more than testing and confirmation that the collider’s new safety systems were fully operable. Tuesday delivered real data, the first in what scientists at Cern expect to be the start of 20 to 25 years of operation.

The stunning technological achievement of building and operating such a device is sometimes overlooked, but is definitely worth remembering as the data begins to flow in the coming weeks. The protons whizz around the 27km closed ring – installed 100m underground in a tunnel under the French/Swiss border – at close to the speed of light, completing more than 11,000 circuits of the ring per second.

Their movement is controlled by thousands of huge electromagnets which steer the particles around the ring and prevent them from touching the sides or each other. These are superconducting magnets, bathed in a surrounding bath of liquid helium that keeps them at a chilly minus 193 degrees. The protons are injected into the ring in little bundles, but this belies what a bundle represents. There are a thousand billion protons clustered together in that bundle, the number so high because they are so impossibly small. Even at those numbers the few millimetres of space they occupy is virtually empty.

The LHC is designed to control two “beams” of protons travelling simultaneously in the ring in opposite directions. Last Tuesday’s run involved injecting two bundles of protons into each of the two beams, so it might seem the space would be fairly crowded. Yet the LHC, when running at design capacity in the coming years, will handle 2,800 bundles of protons per beam, with the protons – numbering about 10 to the power of 11 according to experimenters – yielding about 44 million collisions per second.

We already have accelerators that can smash particles. What the LHC has that others don’t is its colossal collision energies that are multiples of the highest achieved up until this week.

These energies are measured in electron volts, the energy picked up by a single electron when accelerated by a one volt electric field. This is too small to imagine but in the LHC the collisions will arrive at a million million electron volts, 10 to the power of 12 or tera electron volts (TeV). The old collider energy record set in the US was just under 2TeV, but yesterday the LHC’s twin beams each running at 3.5 TeV collided to achieve a combined energy of 7 TeV. And its designed running energy, likely to be reached in its third year of operation, will touch 14 TeV.

Amazing as they are, those are just numbers. What is important is the flood of important new data that will arrive. The collisions smash the proton asunder, revealing its constituent parts. These fundamental particles tell scientists much about the nature of matter and how it all fits together, whether we are talking about a single atom or a galaxy.

With data already flowing, Cern director general Rolf Heuer believes that scientists may soon be able to prove a theory called “supersymmetry”, that there is an inherent physical linkage between pairs of fundamental particles.

The LHC will also allow deeper insight into the mysterious “dark matter”, a substance that we know must exist and makes up near 25 per cent of the entire universe, but that we cannot yet see or understand despite its massive content.

Then there is the famous Higgs Boson. This is an elusive fundamental particle theorised to exist by Peter Higgs but yet to be found. The LHC has the energies needed to reveal the Higgs to us, something at will help complete the jigsaw puzzle of known fundamental particles.