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Posts Tagged ‘Hadron Collider’

LHC sets new energy record, full power still year away

The excitement in the particle physics community is palpable at the moment, with a regular stream of tweets emitting from CERN. In the latest news, the large Hadron collider (LHC) reported that it had reached 1.18TeV with its beams, the highest energy ever recorded for an Earth-bound particle accelerator.

The unexciting news is that we are all still here, and (barring a meteor strike) we will still be here when the LHC reaches 7.5TeV very late next year. In the meantime, what can we expect during the build-up? According to Lynn Evans, the operators of the LHC are taking it very slowly this time, having become a bit paranoid about little things like resistance building in the brazed joints between magnets. One reason for this caution is that not every sector of the LHC was brought back up to room temperature, which means that extra pressure relief valves have not yet been installed on the whole machine yet—that will have to wait until the next maintenance period. 

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Week in Tech: Large Hadron Collider working, Ubuntu matures

Version 5 of the popular Mac virtualization package, Parallels Desktop, has hit the streets, and Ars puts it through its paces. Gaming performance, Windows 7, content creation, Linux—it’s all here, plus the inevitable comparisons to the most recent VMware Fusion release.

After a series of complications and setbacks, the Large Hadron Collider sees its first particle-particle collisions after a weekend of furious activity. While these weren’t at any significant energy, the milestone marks an important step in getting the mammoth machine up and running and filling in the last space on the particle bingo card.

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Large Hadron Collider reboots, makes first protonic bang!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that most epic triumph of human engineering and physics research has finally taken place, and strangely enough our planet’s still in one piece too. The search for the Higgs boson particle resumed yesterday, somewhere under the Franco-Swiss border, with the CERN research team successfully executing what the LHC was built to do — accelerating proton beams to nearly the speed of light, then filming the wreckage as they crash into each other. Having encountered a number of bumps in the road, the researchers have had to significantly scale down the energy at which their early collisions will take place, with the very first ones said to have happened at 900 billion electron volts. Still, plans are afoot for an imminent shift up to 1.2 trillion electron volts (TeV), which would be the highest energy level any particle accelerator has achieved yet, before a ramp up to 7 TeV over the coming year if all goes well.

Large Hadron Collider reboots, makes first protonic bang! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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