 being installed into ATLAS, one of two main particle detectors built to study collisions in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, which is slated for a key test this weekend.)
BEAM PIPE (blue) being installed into ATLAS, one of two main particle detectors built to study collisions in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, which is slated for a key test this weekend.
Image: © CERN
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Gravity's Engines
We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they...
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After 14 years of construction and $8 billion, the world's mightiest particle accelerator is about to get a taste of what it was built for.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), nearing readiness outside Geneva, Switzerland, was designed to smash protons together at the highest energies ever achieved in hopes of unlocking new secrets of the universe. But to date, all that's traveled through its circular beam pipe are ping-pong balls to test for obstructions.
That's all about to change. This weekend, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, plans to test a key component of the accelerator by injecting a low-intensity beam of protons clockwise into the LHC and letting it travel three kilometers (two miles) through the machine.
Assuming all goes as planned, the lab announced today that it will send the first beam around all 27 kilometers (17 miles) of pipe on September 10, the machine's official start-up date.
This weekend's test will mark CERN's first attempt to feed protons (or, simply, "beam") into the LHC from a chain of smaller accelerators. These feeder accelerators cannot inject straight into the LHC because their pipes are enclosed in bulky magnets that steer the protons.
Instead, protons enter the LHC ring at an angle. That means a magnet has to nudge the protons to enter the circular beam pipe on the tangent. This "kicker" magnet, which CERN has never had the chance to test until now, must switch on at precisely the right moment to nudge the near light-speed beam, and then switch off just as fast.
If the test works, "I think we'll have some very happy people around this weekend," CERN spokesperson James Gillies said. It might take a few attempts, he added.
Then, in coming weeks, CERN plans to inject a second, counterclockwise beam from a different point on the ring. The LHC is designed to collide two opposing beams—one clockwise and one counterclockwise—each with an energy of seven tera-electron volts (TeV), equivalent to the energy of a speeding train. (A TeV is equal to one trillion electron-volts.)
Researchers believe that when the two beams smash together for a combined 14 TeV, never-before-seen particles may pop out, such as the long-sought Higgs boson, thought to be the source of matter's mass.
Powerful superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid helium to within 1.9 kelvins (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of absolute zero (–459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or –273.15 degrees Celsius), keep the protons on course and accelerate them to higher speeds. The circulating beam that CERN plans to inject on September 10 will carry the minimum energy possible for the LHC, only 0.45 TeV. The lab plans to push the beams to a combined 10 TeV by year's end.
Workers are still finishing cooling down the eight sectors of the LHC, which are defined by eight points along the ring where protons may enter or collide. In this weekend's test, researchers will send beam from the second point to a removable obstruction placed at the third—the only sector that has reached operating temperature.
Switching on an accelerator for the first time is liable to uncover a few glitches, says Peter Limon, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., who spent the last two years at CERN.
He says that when Fermilab sent its first full beam through the Tevatron machine in 1983, it unexpectedly stopped after a few turns around the six-kilometer (four-mile) ring. The problem: a Kimwipe, a tissue paper used in labs, was clogging the pipe.
A similar obstruction would set back the LHC schedule by weeks. To remove it, researchers would have to go through the slow process of warming the magnets around the obstruction (access to which would otherwise be blocked by the liquid helium cooling jacket) and then re-cooling them.
But engineers are hoping that their pretesting—using compressed air to fire a ping-pong ball down the pipe, Gillies says—will prevent such a mishap. "It's a very simple solution to the problem, but it's very effective, too," he says. "If the ping-pong ball appears, then you know that the beam pipe's clear."
Limon agrees it would be an unlikely outcome. More likely, he says, would be problems in a few of the thousands of sensors strung along the pipe that monitor the position and intensity of beam and look for slight deviations in it such as wobbling to the right or left.
Electrical cables plugged in the wrong way would switch the "polarity" of a sensor, causing it to confuse left and right. "Much of this stuff has been tested, but none of it has been tested with beam," Limon says.
If any of the LHC's 1,200 bending magnets are even slightly tilted, he says, the beam would veer up or down out of the ring's plane. In that case, CERN would adjust the strength of compensating magnets to coax the beam back into shape.
Without a test, it's impossible to know, Limon says: "In the end, there's nothing like beam."
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25 Comments
Add CommentFor the uninitiated, Kimwipes are used in kimistry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the uninitiated, Kimwipes are used in kimistry to clean up kimical spills.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow! This day has been long in coming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the 1980s, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was being designed. By 1993, 15 miles of tunnel had already been bored in Texas when the whole project was cancelled, mostly to pay for the ISS (International Space Station).
While the US keeps on piling deficits onto a huge growing debt while neglecting science and research, we have to be thankful to the rest of the world to keep the flame alive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell you never know what can happen with these things, no scientist on earth could. It's simply "mad" science. I hope all goes well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, this could end up in disaster or success. This is simply what you would call "mad" science, like the atomic bomb, but , this could be alot more dangerous if anything goes wrong.
I subscribe to Scientific American and New Scientists and both magazines have virtually ignored the safety issue. There will be plenty of time for science after the experiment begins. The time to discuss safety is before collisions begin!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are these publications ignoring the pleas and warnings of scientists as prestigious as Professor Dr. Otto E. Rossler who wrote papers refuting CERN's self serving hurried safety arguments?
Copies of Dr. Rossler's work is available at LHCFacts.org.
It is scientific projects like the LHC that moderate my pessimistic expectations for mankind, especially here in America. Such noble goals and prodigious efforts often seem to me but tiny islands in an ocean of rancor, greed, self-interest, ignorance and vulgar consumerism. In my lifetime I have seen such scientific milestones as the relativity theories, quantum mechanics, nuclear power, television, the transistor, the Internet, the home computer, the conquering of myriad dread diseases and space travel. But it saddens me that my great-great grandchildren will probably not witness the emergence of the true brotherhood of man. It seems some unforeseeable catastrophe will be required to bring us to our senses. Perhaps mankind might simply be extinguished before our grand cosmological opportunity comes to fruition. I take comfort in my conviction that, should this be the case, other sentient beings on other worlds in other times and places will triumph where we failed. Perhaps they will see that a mindless focus on self, mad consumption and animal experience comes at the expense of the cosmos. - Jerome Thomas
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEveryone is invited to attend a CERN LHC/ALICE/ATLAS - Public Opinion Debate & Poll Forum Invitational, at the new-improved web-link below.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://thefifthknight.blogspot.com/
Remember: Follow the 'White Rabbit'!
Do people not realize how disappointing it would be if this did not produce a new baby universe? Please think about what I just said long and hard. This could produce a new universe....on top of our own....that is, destroying our own. It will ack like a key, fusing together the two protons...two will become one.....this is no joke, all of you. I would like to speak with the top official in charge of this project....please....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo people not realize how disappointing it would be if this did not produce a new baby universe? Please think about what I just said long and hard. This could produce a new universe....on top of our own....that is, destroying our own. It will act like a key, fusing together the two protons...two will become one.....this is no joke, all of you. I would like to speak with the top official in charge of this project....please....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, I just looked up what happens if two nuclei fuse. They apparently create helium. Hopefully that is all that will happen. If this happens in the sun all the time, then there is nothing to worry about at all. Please, someone who knows this process well, tell me if there is any diffenence between the collider's ingredients and the sun's, generally speaking. Are they both capable of fusing the exact same nuclei together, theoretically. Thank you. Kash
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just got it....this is an experimental project for creating an unlimited power source. Please let me know your thoughts.Thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is an attempt at a fusion reactor. Please, I would really like to talk to someone. Thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFusion is going the wrong way. These colliders aren't going to be power plants. They aren't going to make helium from hydrogn nuclei. They are going to smash the two beams together and pick up the peices to see what is inside them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProtons are used because they have a reasonably large mass, they are not elementry, and they have an electric charge.
So since the proton have quarks inside them we need to smash thes guys really hard in order to get the quarks inside to smash a part too. The electric charge allows the magnets to "stear" them around the circle and aimed at each other.
I'm not sure how this one will go, but some colliders use matter and anti-matter to create high energies to see what quantum particles are created from the conversion of mass into energy.
If you want to go into conspiracy theories you can say the energies will make micro-black holes and kill us all. But when the first atomic bombs were tested is was thought that the intense heat would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere and cause the air to burn up in a catastrophic chain reaction.
I think jtankers is needlessly sounding alarmist on the safety issue. To support his conjecture that the LHC is inherently unsafe, he has cited the work of just one scientist, Dr Otto Rossler. One bizarre prediction by some of the dissenters is that the LHC would "create" a Black Hole", a ridiculous premise by any standards. Energetic collisions on the scale of the LHC routinely occur in the upper atmospher in cosmic ray collisions. So far no Black Hole has materialized to swallow the earth in its vicious gravitational vortex. Any safety concerns are of the routine nature which I believe have already been addressed by the scientists and technologists who are pre-eminent in their respective fields.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthink jtankers is needlessly sounding alarmist on the safety issue. To support his conjecture that the LHC is inherently unsafe, he has cited the work of just one scientist, Dr Otto Rossler. One bizarre prediction by some of the dissenters is that the LHC would "create" a Black Hole", a ridiculous premise by any standards. Energetic collisions on the scale of the LHC routinely occur in the upper atmospher in cosmic ray collisions. So far no Black Hole has materialized to swallow the earth in its vicious gravitational vortex. Any safety concerns are of the routine nature which I believe have already been addressed by the scientists and technologists who are pre-eminent in their respective fields.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt looks really hot, smashing gold turns inside out like little worm holes they leave little invisible holes in the vaccum if pie =13.3 and 360 was a cirlce and you could smash the mass of zero into gold at 45 times the speed of light what is spelled wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is quite sad to see SciAm report the rosy picture without considering the potential dangers which have long been identified with this project.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think LHC is very important for understanding the ultimate structure of matter. As for the dangers, I remember that in his book "ABC of Relativity" Bertrand Russell said, referring to the dangers of atomic auto-annihilation of mankind that such an event could be welcome for life on Earth, because the new species that will replace us will be less atrocious than man. (I quote from memory, but that was the sense)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this** please don't spam your comments if you have no idea what is really going on. Also chaosqueued, humans have never created antimatter so I don't know what you are talking about. The safety is an issue just from the sheer amount of energy involved in these collisions. As for ripping a whole in the universe, you're better off sticking to sci-fi novels...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Also chaosqueued, humans have never created antimatter so I don't know what you are talking about." - rizzzle
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis article from CERN from back in 2002 seems to back me up.
http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/factory/AM-factory00_discovery.html
LETS GET ON WITH IT, I'D LIKE TO FIND HIGGS
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLETS GET IT ON, I WANT TO FIND HIGGS
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis shit is fucking crazy , i just hope we all dont die. i think we should have a vote throughout the worlds population on wither to do this experiment or not to. instead of some scientists with their heads so far up there ass that are not even thinking about the over 6 billion people on the earth that could potentially die instantly .................they should of maybe used the money spent on this shit on something that will help the people of our planet. what is the knowledge we could potentially learn worth to the other 99.999999999999999999 percent of humans that couldnt care any less of the knowledge some scientist are going to potentially learn ......so they should just never run these tests and then we wont have to put our whole human population at risk of excticion let alone possible destroying the whole universe.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis might be my very last comment ever!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi was scared when i heard the news today, they said, this might be the last day on earth. . . people, please please don't fuck up!!! I'm think I'm gonna make love to my girlfriend now, hope the sun still shine's the day after tomorrow!