❝ Hundreds of feet below the French-Swiss border lays the Large Hadron Collider. The 17 miles of strange tunnels accelerate particles at close to the speed of light before smashing them together to see what happens.
That’s an oversimplification of a complicated process, one where a lot can go wrong. Someone has to monitor the miles of concrete, plastic, steel, and glass below the earth to avoid disaster and keep science moving. Someone does, someone called … TIM.
Tag: LHC
Not 12 Monkeys – but, a Fouine shuts down the Large Hadron Coillider
Click to enlarge — Alamy
❝ The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has been brought to its knees by a beech marten, a member of the weasel family, that chewed through wiring connected to a 66,000-volt transformer.
The Large Hadron Collider on the outskirts of Geneva was designed to recreate in miniature fireballs similar to the conditions that prevailed at the birth of the universe, but operations of the machine, which occupies a 17-mile tunnel beneath Switzerland, have been placed on hold pending repairs to the unit.
The collider, which discovered the Higgs boson in July 2012, is expected to be out of action for a week while the connections to the transformer are replaced. Any remains of the intruder are likely to be removed at the same time.
❝ In an in-house report on the incident, managers at Cern, the European nuclear physics laboratory that runs the LHC, described the incident at the transformer unit as being caused by a “fouine” – a beech marten native to the region. The report concluded it was “not the best week for the LHC”.
The glitch echoes a similar event in 2009 when the power was cut to one of the LHC’s cooling plants leading to unwelcome temperature rises in the collider’s apparatus. That incident was blamed, at least tentatively, on a bird dropping part of a baguette on a compensating capacitor where the mains supply entered the LHC from the ground.
Fodder for the spookier portions of global nutball culture. My mate in Oz who emailed the link to this article couldn’t resist declaring the fouine was “clearly sent from the future to stop the apocalypse” often predicted by the tinfoil-hat set as a result of the LHC turning Switzerland into a Black Hole.
Thanks, Honeyman
CERN’s potential new particle discovery is a game changer
❝The team at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may have discovered a new particle. In its first set of significant results since the upgrade earlier this year, LHC researchers have observed large spikes in energy that could be the result of particle collisions between a new boson even larger than the Higgs.
If it turns out that the data does indeed represent a new particle it would be “a total game changer,” Gian Francesco Giudice, a CERN theorist who wasn’t involved in the discovery, told Nature. “The Higgs boson pales in comparison, in terms of novelty.”
❝The results appear to confirm speculation about a new discovery at the LHC that has been circulating on social media for the last couple of days. Judging by the results, the particle — if it is a new discovery — would be about four times larger than the top quark, the heaviest particle so far discovered. And it would be six times bigger than the Higgs.
The announcement comes after the researchers spotted unexpected spikes in energy that reflect a collision between super-high energy protons. The different teams working at the LHC have similar results — they both saw an excess number of pairs of photons each carrying around 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) of energy. They believe this could have come from the decay of a new 1,500 GeV particle…
❝The reason CERN has published the results — which it wouldn’t normally do with so little evidence — is that both the Atlas and CMS teams saw the same thing. Atlas saw 40 incidences of the 750 GeV energy pairs, and CMS saw 10.
But it could just be a statistical bump, which occurs all the time. “We expect about ten times as much data next year, which should help resolve this question – but quite likely throw up new ones,” Dave Charlton continued.
The researchers expect to verify whether this represents a new particle or just a bump in 2016.
Between Congressional beancounters and a guy named Clinton in the White House offering wimp-class support, the attempt to build a superconducting super-collider in the United States failed. It would have been three times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider v1.0.
We had lots of money and time left after that to devote to the Crusades in the Middle East, Homeland Insecurity and the War on Terror, though. American politicians surely know how to organize priorities, eh?
Nutball claims LHC is Stargate – and the invasion of Earth less than 3 weeks away
This is NOT the Large Hadron Collider and the scientific staff of CERN
Bad news, citizens of Earth: those evil physicists at CERN are once again hellbent on vaporizing the Earth and ending the universe as we know it as the Large Hadron Collider ramps up to unprecedented energies. That’s according to Lonnie Robinson, intrepid correspondent/prophet of doom for The Daily Reporter in Coldwater, Michigan, who sees the signs of our imminent destruction everywhere he looks (including The Simpsons). He even pegs the specific day on which we can probably expect global annihilation: September 24, 2015.
The good news: Lonnie Robinson is full of shit.
Seriously, I am baffled that this article ever found its way into The Daily Reporter. At first I thought it had to be The Onion or a similar satirical site, but no — it’s an actual newspaper. Were the editors asleep at the wheel?…
..These are words that Robinson actually wrote, and presumably some editor at The Daily Reporter approved: “Two of the major goals for CERN is to collapse and break apart the God Particle that creates and maintains our physical world and to tear a hole through the veil that is the barrier protecting our physical universe from the unknown, non-physical universes and other non-physical dimensions believed to be located outside our physical universe…. CERN destroys matter, and everything in our universe is matter. Destroying physical matter eliminates the restrictions and barriers produced by physical matter that keeps us from entering the non-physical universes around us.”
There is so much wrong in that short excerpt, it’s not even worth debunking. This is the full-on crazy mode of the hardcore conspiracy theorist, made crystal clear by this little gem:
“CERN is being used as a stargate, so that human scientists will be able to go to and from currently unknown, perhaps very hostile, non-physical worlds and dimensions located and currently unseen, outside our physical universe.”…
…Note to Robinson: The Stargate franchise is not a documentary. And neither was Interstellar.
Robinson may be serious. I think it more likely the article was produced as clickbait for a smalltown newspaper with nothing else to do to pass the time. Who knows? By the 24th they may have acquired a sponsor or two, someone selling gold for Ron Paul?
The Large Hadron Collider is switching back on – What do scientists hope to learn?
Click to enlarge
The Large Hadron Collider — the particle accelerator used to discover the Higgs boson in 2012 — is being fired back up after a two-year break.
The gigantic collider (which includes a 17-mile-long underground tunnel that runs between France and Switzerland) was shut down in February 2013 so engineers could make upgrades. Now, physicists are starting it back up for a new series of experiments intended to push the laws of physics to their limits…
In essence, these experiment involve shooting beams of particles around the ring, using enormous magnets to speed them up to 99.9999 percent of the speed of light (causing them to whip around the ring about 11,000 times per second), then crashing them together. Sophisticated sensors capture all sorts of data on the particles that result from these collisions.
The huge amount of energy present in these collisions leads the particles to break apart and recombine in some pretty exotic ways. And these conditions can reveal flaws in the standard model of physics — currently our best formula for predicting the behavior of all matter.
Physicists want to do this because, as accurate as the standard model seems to be, it’s still incomplete…
The LHC’s biggest finding so far was the July 2012 discovery of an elementary particle called the Higgs boson.
Since the 1960s, the Higgs boson was thought to exist as a part of the Higgs field: an invisible field that permeates all space and exerts a drag on every particle. This field, physicists theorized, is why we perceive particles to have mass…
On paper, the Higgs field and boson both made a lot of sense — all the equations of the standard model pointed toward their existence. But we had no direct physical evidence of them…
After several years of upgrading the LHC’s magnets (which speed up and control the flow of particles) and data sensors, it’ll begin…a new series of experiments that will involve crashing particles together with nearly twice as much energy as before.
These more powerful collisions will allow scientists to keep discovering new (and perhaps larger) particles, and also look more closely at the Higgs boson and observe how it behaves under different conditions…
Once upon a time, it looked like a truly gigantic accelerator would actually be built in the US. In 1989, Congress agreed to spend $6 billion to build the Superconducting Super Collider: a 54-mile-long underground ring in Waxahachie, Texas, that would have produced collisions with five times as much energy as the LHC’s. But in 1993, with the costs rising to a projected $11 billion, Congress killed the project — after $2 billion had already been spent on drilling nearly 15 miles of tunnel.
Just in case you thought stupid was a new definition of Congressional priorities.
Invading other countries because liars in the White House say we must; building new fleets of fighter jets and ships to protect landing craft for future invasions because liars in the military-industrial complex say we must; building bridges to nowhere instead of repairing and improving our nation’s infrastructure because powerful members of Congress say we must – are the kinds of commitments to increasing the national debt that our politIcians adore, the average American loves. The size of the “Boom” is sufficiently impressive to draw everyone’s attention away from the results of science and studies headquartered outside our borders.
And TV news-as-entertainment gets to fill the space where conversation used to get in the way with beaucoup footage of all the people around the world who love Americans more than ever.
Who needs science, anyway?
Addendum: Ursarodinia sent me this link this morning – before the LHC post; but, I didn’t get round to checking my email until late this afternoon.
CERN/Large Hadron Collider wins best Twitter account in Switzerland
At the worldwebforum conference in Zurich, CERN was presented with the award of Best Swiss Twitter Page 2015.
Nicholas Muldoon, Agile coach at Twitter, selected CERN from a list of 10 Twitter accounts ranging from tourism to luxury brands to sports personalities. He presented the award to Kate Kahle, CERN’s social media manager and James Gillies, CERN’s head of communication… This award follows a report in 2013 that named CERN the most effective international organization on Twitter. In 2014, the @CERN Twitter account passed the 1 million followers mark and online audiences continue to grow on CERN’s social media platforms.
The laboratory is active on social media on Twitter in English and French as well as Facebook, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram and the CERN communications group works closely with Human Resources and the LHC experiments for additional social media channels.
I’ve not been able to verify that a group of conspiracy theorists specializing in End of Days predictions have setup a SnapChat account for the LHC Big Bang they expect.
Thanks, Ursarodinia
CERN ready to continue the search for exotic particles
Click to enlarge — Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is once again getting ready to smash protons together, hoping to find evidence of elusive and exotic particles that have never been detected before.
The largest and fastest particle accelerator in the world, located in Geneva, will officially start up again in March. When it is turned on, scientists and engineers say the two beams of protons that fly around its 17-mile loop at close to the speed of light will collide with nearly double the energy of the previous run.
The collider’s first stint of proton smashing led to the discovery of the Higgs boson or Higgs particle — a long theorized but never before seen subatomic particle. It exists for just a fraction of a second, and yet its discovery helps explain the existence of all the mass in the universe.
Scientists are not sure what they will find this time around, but some possibilities include particles associated with dark energy and dark matter, as well as particles that could provide evidence for a theory known as supersymmetry. This theory holds that there is a mirror universe made up of invisible particles that have mass but do not react with light, and that correspond to particles that we can detect…
For the last two years the collider has been undergoing repairs and changes in preparation for its next, super-powered run. Already it has already been cooled to its normal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees Kelvin, or -456.25 degrees Fahrenheit.
I surprised we haven’t yet suffered the onslaught of popsci/junksci Talking Heads predicting the end of the world as soon as the the ON-switch is thrown at CERN.
Not that it requires any original thought. Less-than-competent conspiracy nuts have been predicting a human-made end of the earth since the first nuclear reaction. I don’t doubt the Leyden Jar provoked as much fear and trepidation. You’d think the expanding base of real knowledge would diminish fear-mongers.
But, then, who would be left to vote for Prohibition?
We’re sure this is a Higgs boson – just not which one?
Click to enlarge
Last July physics researchers at CERN said they thought they had found evidence of the Higgs boson, a theoretical but essential component of our standard model of physics, and the raison d’être of the enormous Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Now they’ve come back with further analysis of their data, and they’re more sure than ever that what they found is the real deal.
How sure? Well, these are scientists so there’s still a note of caution, but Joe Incandela, a spokesman for one of the LHC experiments, went on-record with a pretty confident statement: “The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson.”
However, they’re still not sure what kind of Higgs boson they’re looking at…
“Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.”
It’s not surprising that this task takes time. CERN said a month ago that its storage systems were holding 100 petabytes of data.
The research organization has been working closely with companies such as Yandex to sift through that information in search of unusual events, and in Thursday’s statement CERN pointed out that finding one event means looking through around a trillion proton-proton collisions.
Probably more demanding than sifting through all the phony corporate fronts in the Cayman Islands.
Higgs boson was just a start – other mysteries await
Mark Thiessen/National Geographic Society
When it comes to shutting down the most powerful atom smasher ever built, it’s not simply a question of pressing the off switch.
In the French-Swiss countryside on the far side of Geneva, staff at the Cern particle physics laboratory are taking steps to wind down the Large Hadron Collider. After the latest run of experiments ends next month, the huge superconducting magnets that line the LHC’s 27km-long tunnel must be warmed up, slowly and gently, from -271 Celsius to room temperature. Only then can engineers descend into the tunnel to begin their work.
The machine that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson – or a convincing subatomic impostor – faces a two-year shutdown while engineers perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year…
The particle accelerator, which reveals new physics at work by crashing together the innards of atoms at close to the speed of light, fills a circular, subterranean tunnel a staggering eight kilometres in diameter. Physicists will not sit around idle while the collider is down. There is far more to know about the new Higgs-like particle, and clues to its identity are probably hidden in the piles of raw data the scientists have already gathered, but have had too little time to analyse.
But the LHC was always more than a Higgs hunting machine. There are other mysteries of the universe that it may shed light on. What is the dark matter that clumps invisibly around galaxies? Why are we made of matter, and not antimatter? And why is gravity such a weak force in nature? “We’re only a tiny way into the LHC programme,” says Pippa Wells, a physicist who works on the LHC’s 7,000-tonne Atlas detector. “There’s a long way to go yet…”
The search for dark matter on Earth has failed to reveal what it is made of, but the LHC may be able to make the substance. If the particles that constitute it are light enough, they could be thrown out from the collisions inside the LHC. While they would zip through the collider’s detectors unseen, they would carry energy and momentum with them. Scientists could then infer their creation by totting up the energy and momentum of all the particles produced in a collision, and looking for signs of the missing energy and momentum.
One theory, called supersymmetry, proposes that the universe is made from twice as many varieties of particles as we now understand. The lightest of these particles is a candidate for dark matter…
Another big mystery the Large Hadron Collider may help crack is why we are made of matter instead of antimatter. The big bang should have flung equal amounts of matter and antimatter into the early universe, but today almost all we see is made of matter. What happened at the dawn of time to give matter the upper hand?
The question is central to the work of scientists on the LHCb detector. Collisions inside LHCb produce vast numbers of particles called beauty quarks, and their antimatter counterparts, both of which were common in the aftermath of the big bang. Through studying their behaviour, scientists hope to understand why nature seems to prefer matter over antimatter…
Extra dimensions may separate us from realms of space we are completely oblivious to. “There could be a whole universe full of galaxies and stars and civilisations and newspapers that we didn’t know about,” says Parker. “That would be a big deal.”
Read the whole article. Set your imagination free into science that moves faster than the speed of light.
Go Ask ALICE — scientists enter primeval plasma wonderland
Scientists at CERN have smashed together various particles for the first time, moving closer to learning what was in the super-hot plasma wonderland that formed right after the primeval Big Bang…
The announcement followed another boost for physicists at CERN near Geneva with the effective endorsement by independent experts in a key journal of their claimed discovery of a new particle, the Higgs Boson.
CERN’s ALICE experiment, one of six grouped around its underground Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has been analyzing particles that emerged from the overnight smashing together of tiny hydrogen-derived protons and much larger lead nuclei.
“It was really a pilot run to see if the LHC can produce these asymmetric collision systems. It showed that it can, and it worked like a charm,” Johannes Wessels, an ALICE scientist, told Reuters. “We are very excited about the results.”
The function of ALICE — acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment — is to probe what happens to matter when it is heated to 250,000 times the temperature at the centre of the sun — as in the “quark-gluon plasma” at the birth of the cosmos.
Until now, in the search for the Higgs and the “New Physics” that encompasses concepts like super-symmetry, dark matter, extra dimensions and parallel worlds, CERN has smashed only identical particles together at close to the speed of light…
“Whether we’ve been smashing hydrogen protons or lead protons together, it’s been like hitting oranges with oranges. But now it’s like colliding apples and oranges,” said another CERN scientist. “It’s a different ball game.”
The 2-year wait for the coming upgrade is going to rush by like the solar wind.
Eideard 