LHC - Large Hadron Collider

Man from the future try to destroy the LHC

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 13:53:08 +0000

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

LHC Live webcast: 30 March 2010

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:21:05 +0000

Five webcasts will be available on 30 March, starting from 8:30am (Central European Summer Time – CEST). The main webcast will include live footage from the control rooms for the LHC accelerator and all four LHC experiments and coverage of the press conference after the first collisions are announced. Webcasts will also be available from the control rooms of the four LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. The webcasts will be primarily in English.

Link: http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/

World’s Largest Particle Collider Back In Action

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:52:34 +0000

The world’s largest particle collider is back in business. The Large Hadron Collider broke down last fall. It has taken a year to repair, but this month it began smashing again at record energies. Scientists at CERN, Europe’s particle physics lab, are eagerly preparing for a new era in the field.

It’s the middle of the night in a room that looks like mission control. There are huge flat screen monitors lining the walls, and about a dozen people are watching those monitors carefully. But instead of looking up, this mission control is looking down. About 300 feet below is a detector the size of a five-story building.

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LHC: progress in commissioning proton beams

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:47:14 +0000

After becoming the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the LHC is now making progress in commissioning stable beams and providing more collisions at the four points for several hours at a time. For the first time, beams have circulated with more than one bunch of protons, thus increasing the intensity.

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Large Hadron Collider Makes History with 1.18 TeV Protons

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:39:48 +0000

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.

In the early hours of Monday morning local time, the LHC accelerated protons to a record-breaking 1.18 TeV (tera-electronvolts). The previous record sat at 0.98 TeV and was achieved by Fermilab’s Tevatron in Illinois back in 2001.

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Large Hadron Collider sends beams in 2 directions

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:02:55 +0000

The world’s largest atom smasher made another leap forward Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.

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Large Hadron Collider ready to restart

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:42:18 +0000

Collected below are some photographs of the repairs, and of the LHC and some of its experiments in various stages of construction. (30 photos total)

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A Tumultuous Year at the LHC

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:37:53 +0000

On October 21, 2008, in accordance with some overly optimistic scheduling, 1,500 physicists and world leaders gathered outside Geneva to celebrate the inauguration of the biggest, most international, most expensive, most energetic, most ambitious experiment ever built. I enjoyed the day, which was filled with speeches, music, and—as is important at any European cultural event—good food. And despite anxieties (more on that later), everyone was filled with hope that these experiments would shed light on some of the mysteries surrounding mass, the weakness of gravity, dark matter, and the forces of nature.

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Beam Circulating in LHC Again!

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:37:01 +0000

09:37 PST: Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been eagerly awaiting word that the LHC has successfully threaded the proton beam around the whole ring. In recent days they have gotten it half way around the 27 km circumference, and within hours, they should be able to circulate it and I assume “capture” it with the RF, which creates stable bunches in the synchrotron. Everything has gone very smoothly to this point, so I expect success shortly!

Once beam has circulated stably in both rings, some time next week the LHC team will attempt to collide protons at the injection energy of 450 GeV (a total center of mass energy of 900 GeV). While this is much less than the Tevatron is colliding presently, it could provide some sorely needed initial data for the detectors to do timing and calibration of the various subsystems. There will even hopefully be a few collision events recorded with clear “dijet” structure – collisions where quarks and/or gluons inside the protons hit head on and effectively bounce sideways into the detector, giving two back-to-back collimated sprays of particles. Pictures of such events will be great to see, at long last!

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The LHC Higgs Boson Hunter

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:16:13 +0000

Professor Jonathan Butterworth is an experimental particle physicist at University College London (UCL), and a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

As his team prepares for the re-start of the most complex experiment mankind has ever conceived, Discovery News producer Ian O’Neill manages to catch Prof. Butterworth between TV interviews to chat about micro-black holes, spin-off technologies and why he’s not a big fan of the Higgs boson.

You can follow Prof. Butterworth’s work on the frontier of accelerator physics in a series of short films called “Colliding Particles — Hunting the Higgs.”

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