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Thread: On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

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  1. #11
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Well the LHC continues to come on. It's confirmed that the collider will be starting up at 3.5 tera-electron volts in each beam, half the originally planned energy. Theorists are a bit down about it, but actually the experimentalists seem pretty upbeat. It gives them a chance to run the machine in under less extreme circumstances and really test the full infrastructure from the acceleration mechanism to the detectors (currently tested using cosmic rays) to the vast computer infrastructure built to handle the data. Equally, it's worth noting that the energy will be 3.5 times higher than the tevatron in the States, currently the highest energy accelerator in the world. So it will still be ground breaking.

    Anyway, I'm in CERN this week at a conference so if I hear any juicy tidbits then I'll pass them on. Interestingly it looks like Hawking's giving the symposium on Wednesday. Wonder what he'll be talking about? And I wonder if anyone will ask his opinion on US healthcare (don't know if his involvement got covered much back in the states but apparently a US politician said that under the NHS Hawking wouldn't be alive - to which Hawking replied that he actually travels back to the UK for his NHS treatments. I'm wildly paraphrasing so please correct me if I screwed up that story).
    Last edited by RPMiller; 09-06-2009 at 05:36 PM. Reason: corrected potentially bad word

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