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Large Hadron Collider

DotCommunist said:
theoretical physics is equations on the white board, this is practical. Well think, spods tinkering around with machines only spods understand gave us the manhattan project- which ok was not used for good to start with but cheap clean fuel, just round the corner. Near c spaceflight engine. Anti gravity boots. All the good things promised in SF and tech shows about the future. You may not understand what they are up to, and I'm not 100% sure either. But if it brings us the next gen equivalent of microwaves, plastics, smartphones and neuro-augs then let them get on with it I say. You're nearly my nans age- you remember the time before plastic and microwaves meals. I bet it was shit.
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We had real food, cooked from basic ingredients. It was good.

I'm having problems in converting 1.4 TeV to Watts. I make it 14Bn Watts power draw at full power. That can't be right, can it?
 
Sasaferrato said:
I'm having problems in converting 1.4 TeV to Watts. I make it 14Bn Watts power draw at full power. That can't be right, can it?
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TeV is a measure of energy, not power. Each particle has about the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito - which isn't remarkable unless you have a grasp of how many protons there are in a mosquito. A: fuckloads.
 
laptop said:
Nope: you can't convert TeV to watts any more than you can convert kilos to seconds.

1 TeV per second = 0.160217657 microwatt :)
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Would that be 1eV? If its not, the LHC at 1.4TeV,is the most efficient machine on earth, indeed, it is supplying its own energy. :p:D
 
Sasaferrato said:
Oh. OK. The prefix Tera is 1000000000000 or 10 to the power 12.

So, if 1 TeV is equal to 0.16 millionth of a Watt, how on earth does the LHC operate?
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Step back a bit. The TeV value is very roughly a measure of how much energy is being imparted to the individual particles in the accelerator. Effectively that means
how fast we can make them go before attempting to collide them. The current experiments are accelerating particles to about 0.99999999 of c.

How the LHC operates is a vast ring of superconducting magnets, drawing gigantic currents (like 12000 Amps), in order to impart that kind of energy. The engineering work in order to run the acceleration ring alone is a tremendous feat, never mind the various detectors. Another interesting problem is that the collision events generate a enormous fuckton (I think that is the technical term) of information in a very short time - how to filter out the non-interesting bits, store the interesting bits for analysis, all in the snap of a finger - another thing that is useful.

Doing stuff at the extremes, with lots of smart people across many disciplines working on it, seems to me a good use of money. It's not even all that expensive either - loads of countries chip in to the cost. And we get a better understanding of how the universe works.
 
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TheHoodedClaw said:
Step back a bit. The TeV value is very roughly a measure of how much energy is being imparted to the individual particles in the accelerator. Effectively that means
how fast we can make them go - E =mc^2 and all that - before attempting to collide them. The current experiments are accelerating particles to about 0.99999999 of c.

How the LHC operates is a vast ring of superconducting magnets, drawing gigantic currents (like 12000 Amps), in order to impart that kind of energy. The engineering work in order to run the acceleration ring alone is a tremendous feat, never mind the various detectors. Another interesting problem is that the collision events generate a enormous fuckton (I think that is the technical term) of information in a very short time - how to filter out the non-interesting bits, store the interesting bits for analysis, all in the snap of a finger - another thing that is useful.

Doing stuff at the extremes, with lots of smart people across many disciplines working on it, seems to me a good use of money. It's not even all that expensive either - loads of countries chip in to the cost. And we get a better understanding of how the universe works.
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I had gathered that. :rolleyes::D I was simply wondering if anything of actual use will emerge from the experiment. It is a colossal feat of engineering. Getting the proton beams to collide is mind bogglingly difficult, a nanometre out, and they miss.
 
Sasaferrato said:
I had gathered that. :rolleyes::D I was simply wondering if anything of actual use will emerge from the experiment. It is a colossal feat of engineering. Getting the proton beams to collide is mind bogglingly difficult, a nanometre out, and they miss.
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You have a medical background, yes? Research into supercooled, superconducting magnets wasn't initially aimed at medical uses, but look at all those scanners that use them these days! So who knows what possibilities open up from LHC engineering and theorising. That's kind of half the point.
 
Later this month the first annual meeting of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study will be held at CERN. The FCC is the proposed follow-on to the LHC and will involve the construction of a new ring of up to 100km circumference (cf LHC is 27km). The initial experiments would involve electron-positron collisions up to 400 GeV (centre of mass) before upgrades to proton-proton experiments at energies up to 100 TeV (cf the LHC ring infrastructure which went through similar stages with energies of 209 GeV as LEP and now 8 TeV as the LHC).
FCCplan.pngFCCringview.jpg
There are still plans for a further upgrade to the LHC (up to 14 TeV) within a couple of years and proposals to increase the luminosity of the LHC beyond that (ie effectively increase the number of collision events that can be observed per unit time).

In other news, additional analysis (doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2016)104) of LHC data collected back in 2011/2012 (yes it does take that long and data is re-analysed time and time again) suggests that the Standard Model might not be complete. B mesons are not behaving quite as expected and there is speculation that there might be some new variety of Z-prime boson waiting in the wings. This ties in with results published last summer (DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.111803) on lepton experiments and previous work (DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.101802) involving electron-positron collisions which also suggested the Standard Model needs tuning.
 
Lovely toy for the physicist to play with, certainly. I still await the answer to 'What will this achieve?'. It is all very well to understand the dynamics of micro-particles, but what is the practical outcome? In what way will this huge financial expenditure improve the life of the ordinary man?

I don't know how much the UK has contributed to this project, but I do know that there is a food bank a mile away from me. If the LHC is purely research, with no practical outcome, then the expenditure is obscene.
 
2hats said:
Later this month the first annual meeting of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study will be held at CERN. The FCC is the proposed follow-on to the LHC and will involve the construction of a new ring of up to 100km circumference (cf LHC is 27km). The initial experiments would involve electron-positron collisions up to 400 GeV (centre of mass) before upgrades to proton-proton experiments at energies up to 100 TeV (cf the LHC ring infrastructure which went through similar stages with energies of 209 GeV as LEP and now 8 TeV as the LHC).
View attachment 84530View attachment 84531
There are still plans for a further upgrade to the LHC (up to 14 TeV) within a couple of years and proposals to increase the luminosity of the LHC beyond that (ie effectively increase the number of collision events that can be observed per unit time).

In other news, additional analysis (doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2016)104) of LHC data collected back in 2011/2012 (yes it does take that long and data is re-analysed time and time again) suggests that the Standard Model might not be complete. B mesons are not behaving quite as expected and there is speculation that there might be some new variety of Z-prime boson waiting in the wings. This ties in with results published last summer (DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.111803) on lepton experiments and previous work (DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.101802) involving electron-positron collisions which also suggested the Standard Model needs tuning.
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Nice post. I googled the FCC and nowhere are there cost estimates..... everyone's shy. Who can blame them.:)
 
Sasaferrato said:
Lovely toy for the physicist to play with, certainly. I still await the answer to 'What will this achieve?'. It is all very well to understand the dynamics of micro-particles, but what is the practical outcome? In what way will this huge financial expenditure improve the life of the ordinary man?

I don't know how much the UK has contributed to this project, but I do know that there is a food bank a mile away from me. If the LHC is purely research, with no practical outcome, then the expenditure is obscene.
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How can practical applications of subatomic physics be made without first finding out how it works? When Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1909 you might have asked him at the time what practical use his experiment had. But now we have nuclear reactors and MRI machines and radiocarbon dating and so on.

Pure research and applied science aren't isolated from each other; they are the opposite ends of a spectrum. Cutting pure research would be a short-term gesture that would have negative implications for practical applications in the long run.

Also, the increase in food banks isn't because the state and capital decided to spend the money on physics research instead, but rather because they have attacked workers' wages and conditions while gutting the welfare state. The resources certainly exist so that we could both contribute towards the forefront of scientific research as well as have a country that doesn't need food banks. But that's not happening because it's not in the interests of those in control. If they can get people to attack scientists for the messes created by politicians and businessmen along the way, that's a bonus for them.
 
Sasaferrato said:
I still await the answer to 'What will this achieve?'. It is all very well to understand the dynamics of micro-particles, but what is the practical outcome? In what way will this huge financial expenditure improve the life of the ordinary man?
Click to expand...

No-one is really sure. But fundamental research like this typically has a pay-off measured in decades or more. The 20th century alone is littered with projects and theories that cost a bloody fortune and has zero practical outcome at the time - lasers and relativity being two well known ones on top of NoXion's mention of the atomic model. What happened was that the theoretical research laid the foundation for practical outcomes to actually exist.

It's possible that getting closer to knowing the fundamental nature of matter itself will achieve precisely nothing other than eggheads patting each other on the back and winning the lab sweepstake on the Higgs field (or sweeping up after a particularly unsuccessful party). It's also possible that in 100yrs time some white-haired lunatic might shout Great Scott! as he develops a teleporter or some other ludicrous device that we'd think of today as pie-in-the-sky sci-fi. And that's why "we don't know" is one of the most interesting (even exciting) phrases in physics.

In terms of cost, LHC has a budget of 7.5bn euros spread across the EU for the lifetime of the project, less than 1/2000th of the EU GDP for a single year (much of the money of course went to research and construction institutions also in the EU so it's not like it's being poured into some money-burning power station). Construction cost of the collider was about 3bn euros. Replacement cost of Trident is 25bn quid for the UK alone. It's probably obvious which one I'd rather see the money go to :)
 
Large Hadron Collider: Weasel causes shutdown - BBC News

The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at Cern is offline after a short circuit - caused by a weasel.

The unfortunate creature did not survive the encounter with a high-voltage transformer at the site near Geneva in Switzerland.

The LHC was running when a "severe electrical perturbation" occurred in the early hours of Friday morning.

A spokesman for Cern said that the weasel did not get into the tunnels, just the electrical facilities.
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My friend who works there added this on her FB page:
It has come to my attention that not everybody knows this: In the early hours of this morning, a weasel chewed through a 66kV transformer at point 8 (near the airport) causing a power cut that put the LHC out of action and presumably also rendered the coffee machine useless. It is unknown which of these catastrophes was noted first. According to some reports the weasel was quite well known to those working shifts in the control room, and was quite a big fan of electricity. Now he is dead, and we are not taking any data.
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