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Posts Tagged ‘Highest Energy’

LHC gears up for a long run at half power before long pause

Last week, the people in charge of CERN, the European physics lab that is responsible for the highest energy particle collider on the planet, met to decide a course of action for the coming years. Faced with the reality that equipment upgrades would be necessary before the Large Hadron Collider could reach its full, 14TeV energy levels, the managers decided to plan for a long run at half the rated maximum before shutting it down for extensive work.

According to the CERN news page, 7.0TeV collisions (meaning each of the collider’s proton beams running at 3.5TeV) are within the current operational bounds of the machine. But the superconducting hardware that distributes power to the the magnets that control the beams haven’t been fully updated. This hardware was responsible for the failure that shut the LHC down after its short initial run, so its limitations should be fairly clear to the CERN staff. Replacing this equipment requires that the LHC be warmed up from its normal operating temperatures, which are near absolute zero. That, in turn, requires major downtime.

So, run a machine at the highest energies yet achieved, or shut it down for a long time in order to go even higher? The decision was to perform an initial run at 7TeV until a specific data target was reached, which should take 18 months to two years. At that point, the LHC would be shut down for upgrades that could take a year or more. Science is reporting that the delay has caused Fermilab administrators to reevaluate plans to shut the Tevatron down.

The initial run of the machine allowed researchers to calibrate their instruments on known particles—a scientist who works on the ATLAS detector told Ars that the initial data was “absolutely beautiful.” Dealing with extended operational data should give the grid computing system that analyzes the results a full workout, and may even turn up some predicted particles that lie outside of the reach of the Tevatron’s energies. Next week, we’ll be taking a tour of Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that will include a teleconference with scientists at CERN, so expect more from the world of particle physics soon.

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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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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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