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
I heard the same story, so I doubt you're screwing it up -- although the story I heard was also quite paraphrased (Basically that he said it was thanks to the wonderful care given by the NHS that he WAS still alive).
I'm really interested in those tidbits so please do share them
Well, that's the end of another conference. It was pretty interesting - especially the experimentalists reporting on a range of astrophysics and cosmology experiments. Lots of new data to come from them, as well as some salutary warnings to theorists about getting over excited by results before they are absolutely confirmed. I can't imagine too many theorists are going to worry overmuch about that. Far more fun to speculate about a result that might be there, especially as we wait for the LHC.
On the LHC front things seem to be going well. All the repairs are complete and the installation of the new checking systems sounds to be going well. Still on track for November at 3.5TeV in each beam by all accounts.
Oh, and because this thread has too little eye candy in it, here's the reconstruction of an event taken by CMS when they rammed the beam into some tungsten:
Note that the barrel is about 5 stories tall and each of those blie bars represents the energy deposits of a particle that's substantially smaller than an atomic nucleus.
Those are some neat images, but I haven't a clue as to what they actually mean.
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Good call - sorry for not explaining that at all!
The three images are an elevation view of the CMS (compact muon solenoid) detector on the LHC ring, an end elevation and a 3D view.
The detector actually looks something like this:
The white line along the centre of the elevation view represents the beams coming around the ring and meeting in the middle (though this time it was one beam on a fixed target I believe). The white recangles that look like something from the BBC Micra are the different layers of the detector - small and dense in the middle for very precise tracking measurements. The outer elements are larger as they are basically there to stop particles and measure their energy, rather than precisely tracking their location.
Essentially by the time the particle gets to the outer layers what you are doing is putting a wall in the way and measuring how much damage it does to it. You don't really care that much about the location of the hole it leaves to nano-meter precision. The different blue bars represent an amount of energy deposited in a given direction. These correspond to the debris that comes flying out when you smash two particles together. You analyse all the different products and how much energy they were carrying to reproduce what happened in the event.
Ahhh that helps some, thanks.
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I'm looking at the following picture and I'm thinking I could turn that into a space base within a crater. The blue area would be the actual base while the centre area would be the generator/power supply. The surrounding gray areas would be the elevation levels of the crater.
Your updates are fascinating stuff, torstan. I might understand only half of it but I enjoy reading all of it.
Cheers,
Tim
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It also reminds me of the thingy in Star Wars where Luke learns that DV is his dad and instead of taking his hand he jumps down this big shaft.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
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Definitely a relative of moonbase Alpha:
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Ah yes, I've always had a soft spot for Moonbase Alpha. Unfortunately now I have the Space 1999 theme running through my head. Only one way to fix that... by watching the Space 1999/Dallas mash-up.
Cheers,
Tim
Paratime Design Cartography
"Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?" - Groucho Marx
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