I'm With Stupid wrote:Did I hear something about a baguette causing a problem?

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/10/News%20Articles/1246745?ln=en wrote:In the CERN Control Centre, the operators are now working on optimising the beam parameters and improving the beam lifetime. The energy of the proton beams is currently 450 GeV. The first energy ramp-up is expected in the next few days. High-energy collisions are planned for the end of March. 

newolder wrote:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/10/News%20Articles/1246745?ln=en wrote:In the CERN Control Centre, the operators are now working on optimising the beam parameters and improving the beam lifetime. The energy of the proton beams is currently 450 GeV. The first energy ramp-up is expected in the next few days. High-energy collisions are planned for the end of March. 

Datestamp: Monday 8 March 2010

cateye wrote:

newolder wrote:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/10/News%20Articles/1246745?ln=en wrote:In the CERN Control Centre, the operators are now working on optimising the beam parameters and improving the beam lifetime. The energy of the proton beams is currently 450 GeV. The first energy ramp-up is expected in the next few days. High-energy collisions are planned for the end of March. 

Datestamp: Monday 8 March 2010

They must have created a wormhole!

Rolf Heuer wrote:The LHC is already over a week into its 2010 run, and the start of physics at 7 TeV is just around the corner. Last week, participants at the annual La Thuile workshop in Italy had the chance to take stock of what lies in store for the LHC’s first physics run. They learned that there’s a great sense of anticipation here at CERN and at particle physics labs around the globe, and for good reason – we’re about to open up the biggest range of potential new discovery that particle physics has seen in over a decade.

Our objective over the next 18 to 24 months is to deliver one inverse femtobarn of data to the experiments. In other words, enough data to make significant advances across a wide range of physics channels.

Take supersymmetry. ATLAS and CMS will each have enough data to significantly extend today’s sensitivity to new discoveries. Experiments today are sensitive to some supersymmetric particles with masses up to about 400 GeV. An inverse femtobarn at the LHC pushes that up to about 800 GeV This means that in the next two years, the experiments at the LHC will explore as much territory in their quest for SUSY as has been covered in the history of particle physics to date. In other words, the LHC has a real chance over the next two years of discovering supersymmetric particles, possibly elucidating the nature of the dark matter that accounts for about a quarter of the mass and energy of the Universe.

The Higgs particle is another example. The last word that CERN had to say on the matter came from LEP almost ten years ago. In the last year of LEP running there were tantalising signs that the Higgs might have made an appearance but all we could say for sure was that the Higgs must have a mass above about 115 GeV. Since then, the Tevatron has done great work towards ruling out some of the mass range that the Higgs could inhabit. With an inverse femtobarn of data from the LHC, the combined analyses of ATLAS and CMS will be able to explore a wide mass range, and there’s even a chance of discovery if the particle has a mass near 160 GeV.

At the more exotic end of the potential discovery spectrum, LHC experiments will be sensitive to new massive particles that could herald the presence of extra dimensions. Discoveries up to masses of 2 TeV will be possible, whereas today’s reach is around 1 TeV.

All this makes now a very good time to be a particle physicist, and in particular a student of particle physics. Some 2500 graduate students are eagerly awaiting data from all the LHC experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf and TOTEM. They’re a privileged group, set to produce the first PhD theses at the new high-energy frontier.

Two years of continuous running is a tall order both for the LHC operators and the experiments, but it will be well worth the effort. By abandoning CERN’s traditional annual operational cycle we’re increasing the overall running time and discovery potential over the next three years. This run will be followed by preparations for 14 TeV collisions in a single shutdown and another major advance into new territory as great as the one we are on the threshold of achieving.

A barn (symbol b) is a unit of area. Originally used in nuclear physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and nuclear reactions, today it is used in all fields of high energy physics to express the cross sections of any scattering process. A barn is defined as 10−28 m2 or 100 square femtometers (fm2) and is approximately the cross sectional area of a uranium nucleus. The barn is also the unit of area used in nuclear quadrupole resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance to quantify the interaction of a nucleus with an electric field gradient. While the barn is not an SI unit, it is accepted for use with the SI due to its continued use in particle physics.[1] It is one of the very few units which are accepted to be used with SI units, and one of the most recent units to have been established (cf. the knot and the bar, other non-SI units acceptable in limited circumstances).[2]

crank wrote:Can someone explain an inverse femptobarn? I knew a barn was a unit of area used in nuclear thingies, but an inverse femptobarn as a unit of information/data?--"With an inverse femtobarn of data" or "An inverse femtobarn at the LHC pushes that up to about 800 GeV"?????

Daily Telegraph wrote:Large Hadron Collider ‘to shut down for a year’

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom smasher, will shut down for a year to repair mistakes that were made in its construction.

By Ben Leach
Published: 9:17AM GMT 10 Mar 2010

Dr Steve Myers, a director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the collider, said the machine will close at the end of a 2011.

The collider is expected to reach world record power later this month at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) in its bid to replicate the big bang that started the universe.

But Dr Myers told the BBC that the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential of 14TeV for two years.

“It’s something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error,” he said.

“The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits.”

“You don’t hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other areas that have gone incredibly well.

”With a machine like the LHC, you only build one and you only build it once.“

It is the latest in a series of setbacks for the world’s largest machine, which was first launched in September 2008 amid an international fanfare.

But just nine days later, the £5bn LHC suffered a spectacular failure from a bad electrical connection.

Fifty-three of 1,624 large superconducting magnets - some of them 50 feet long - were damaged and had to be replaced.

Then in November 2009, it emerged that further problems had been caused by a small piece of baguette dropped by a passing bird which landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring.

Brian Cox There is nothing wrong with LHC - lazy journalism. Schedule announced in Jan, 18 months physics, 12 month engineering shutdown afterwards

I just saw the BBC "news" story about LHC schedule - I know I'm a BBC person but it's really shoddy! This kind of thing really annoys me.

Brian Cox ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how complex machines are operated !

I repeat: #LHC will run for 12 - 18 months now. It will then shut down, AS ACCELERATORS DO, for maintenance and upgrades. ENGINEERING !!!

Simon_Gardner wrote:

Daily Telegraph wrote:Large Hadron Collider ‘to shut down for a year’

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom smasher, will shut down for a year to repair mistakes that were made in its construction.

By Ben Leach
Published: 9:17AM GMT 10 Mar 2010


The collider is expected to reach world record power later this month at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) in its bid to replicate the big bang that started the universe.