News Briefs: Sub-Atomic Physics (CERN)

[Darb]

The CERN newsletter indicates that the LHC is on track for increasing their collision energies from 1.1 Tev to 3 Tev by the end of this month (Feb 2010).

[Darb]

CERN's LHC is finally circulating beams again. They're currently at 0.450 TeV, and preparing to slowly work their way up towards 3.5 Tev.

According to what I've read, after working at 3.5 TeV for a while, they have to shut down again for several months (to replace a bunch of magnets), then recertify again, before attempting their design goal of 7 TeV, and higher.

[Darb]

According to the CERN bulletin, the next beam energy increase is planned to happen sometime in the next few days, and it sounds like they're going to try to reach 3.5 TeV by the end of this month.

[Darb]

According to LHC's beam status page, they jumped from 0.450 TeV to 0.786 TeV today.

[jccarlton]

Sounds like their doing things pretty much they way I thought when I posted a few months back. Which is the right way. With new accelerators slow and steady wins in the end.

[Darb]

The latest release, as of March 9th:

http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100309.html

[Darb]

According to what little I'm able to peek into, it looks like (as of this post) the LHC is powered to 0.4 TeV, but they're not actively injecting. Looks like some sort of pause between injection runs, or perhaps they're in a calibration phase.

[Darb]

LHC briefly hits 3.5 TeV. Excerpt from CERN Bulletin quoted below.

This morning, Friday 19 March at 5:23 am, the energy of both beams in the LHC was ramped to 3.5 TeV, a new world record. During the night, operators had tested the performance of the whole machine with two so-called ‘dry runs’, that is, without beams. Given the good overall response, beams were injected at around 3 am and stabilized soon after. The ramp ramp started at around 4:10 and lasted about one hour.

Over the last couple of weeks, operation of the LHC at 450 GeV has become routinely reproducible. The operators could test and optimize the beam orbit, the beam collimation, the injection and extraction phases as well as the associated protection system. On the 12th March, both beams were ramped to 1.18 TeV. The overall response from the machine was very positive.

The first part of this week saw a technical stop, during which the magnet and magnet protection experts continued their campaign to commission the machine to 6 kAmps – the current needed to operate at 3.5 TeV per beam. Tests are still ongoing to fully understand the electrical behaviour of the dipole circuits with currents higher than 2 kAmps, which has an impact on the quench protection system (see box) and on the procedure for ramping the beam energy to 3.5 TeV (6kAmps).

While experts will work to fully understand the circuit performance (for details, watch the embedded video interview with Andrzej Siemko, Group Leader of the LHC machine protection), the operators will continue ramping the beam energy and work on preparing for high-energy collisions later this month.

[Darb]

First 7 TeV collisions in the LHC are scheduled for Tuesday 30 March.

[voralfred]

The fundamental research on the very structure of matter at super-high energy (in the TeV range) which is expected at LHC is fascinating, but why is this thread merged with Polywells and IEC fusion? The latter involve "low energy" accelerators in the 10 to 100 keVs range, tens of millions of time less energy per particle.
These are entirely unrelated concepts. Both involve accelerating particles, but for different aims and at energies that differ by a huge ratio.

[E Pericoloso Sporgersi]

May I (dare I) recommend an entertaining novel which is somewhat relevant right now, though I read it soon after its publication in 1997?
It's a SF story, set in an alternate universe, about an actually finished and operational Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas, originally designed to go up to 40 TeV. Its operation has unexpected (though theoretically not wholly unforeseen) and very dramatic consequences.
Einstein's Bridge, by John Cramer

also available here (Amazon's Europe Branch)

[Darb]

The fundamental research on the very structure of matter at super-high energy (in the TeV range) which is expected at LHC is fascinating, but why is this thread merged with Polywells and IEC fusion? The latter involve "low energy" accelerators in the 10 to 100 keVs range, tens of millions of time less energy per particle.
These are entirely unrelated concepts. Both involve accelerating particles, but for different aims and at energies that differ by a huge ratio.

True, but in the minds of most lay people, anything involving particle accelerators probably all belong together in the same news thread, for ease of location. If this were a more active thread than it is, then I'd agree it would probably merit further decomposition.

[Darb]

First collisions at 7 Tev are scheduled for 8:30am CEST (6:30am UTC) Tues, 30-Mar-2010.

Live webcast info:
http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/

[Darb]

I haven't had a chance to peek at the LHC direct realtime status pages, but according to the mass media it sounds like the first collisions at 7 Tev got underway only about 4.5 hrs behind schedule.

I am looking forward to seeing the first physics at this level.

Eventually, I believe the goal is to achieve full power (14 Tev) in mid 2011.

[Darb]

Here's a link to the latest releases of data:

http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lh ... -news.html

Click the links on the right to see daily presentations from each of the detectors teams.

[Darb]

The fundamental research on the very structure of matter at super-high energy (in the TeV range) which is expected at LHC is fascinating, but why is this thread merged with Polywells and IEC fusion? The latter involve "low energy" accelerators in the 10 to 100 keVs range, tens of millions of time less energy per particle.
These are entirely unrelated concepts. Both involve accelerating particles, but for different aims and at energies that differ by a huge ratio.

True, but in the minds of most lay people, anything involving particle accelerators probably all belong together in the same news thread, for ease of location. If this were a more active thread than it is, then I'd agree it would probably merit further decomposition.

Voralfred,

Upon further reflection I agree with you, and since some ongoing updates on this topic are likely, I've split all sub-atomic physics out into this dedicated news thread.

[Darb]

First Proton-Proton collisions at 7 TeV detected.

http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/public/E ... vents.html

[Darb]

For those like me who's memory of the standard model is a dated (and overdue for brushing up), Berkeley Lab has a very amusing, but surprisingly thorough, overview presentation ...

http://www.particleadventure.org/

Select "The Standard Model" in the lower left, and hit GO.

It's about 60 or so slides.

[Darb]

Lots of new articles released today on the CERN Bulletin site.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulle ... 8916?ln=de

[Darb]

The LHC has re-discovered the W particle (carrier of the weak force) and the B meson ... what once took years of laborious human analysis has been accelerated (pun intented) to mere weeks of intensive computerized result filtration.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulle ... 1777?ln=en

[Darb]

Neutrino oscillations {re}detected.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulle ... 9064?ln=en

Interesting video at the bottom of the article ...

[Darb]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/scien ... ef=science

According to the article above, scientists at Fermilab have indicated that the Higgs Boson is NOT in the range of 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts ... which still leaves 115-157 and 176-200 bev open as the remaining moist likely ranges.

CERN, after having re-verified the existence of all known particles, will be joining the hunt shortly.

[voralfred]

Neutrino oscillations {re}detected.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulle ... 9064?ln=en

Interesting video at the bottom of the article ...

Fascinating!
As I understand it, this is the first "positive" detection of neutrino oscillations. Previous "detections" were "negative", just "missing electron neutrinos", that were most easily explained through oscillations, but might just be explained by other means (not that I personally doubted that neutrino oscillations were responsible, but some people might) so this is really a very very great result!