Götterdämmerung Party?

[Lloyd Danforth]

Probably just as well

[toowm]

update:

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=worries-about-lhc-black-hole-resurf-2009-01-29

[Pat McCotter]

Large Hadron Collider reaches an initial energy milestone
Nov 30, 2009
By Larry Greenemeier

The embattled Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reached its first major milestone Monday as it accelerated its twin beams of protons to 1.18 TeV (more than one trillion electron volts) of energy, eclipsing the previous record of 0.98 TeV (tera–electron volts) of energy held by Fermi National Accelerator Lab's Tevatron in Batavia, Ill., since 2001, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, aka CERN.

The LHC's mission is to help scientists better understand the origins of the universe, explain why particles have mass and search for dark matter. Just 10 days ago, CERN woke the world's most powerful particle accelerator from a yearlong slumber, during which scientists repaired a helium leak caused by a faulty electrical connection. The LHC has already outlasted its previous run, which ended in September 2008, nine days after beams began circulating. Since that time CERN has been repairing, upgrading and recommissioning the machine.

Today's success nearly matched the 1.2 TeV of energy that CERN scientists had been shooting for as an initial target. The eventual goal is for the LHC to accelerate protons to seven TeV of energy, 7,000 times as much energy as a proton at rest has embodied in its mass, according to a February 2008 Scientific American special report on the LHC. At maximum strength, the LHC's circulating particles are expected to "carry energy roughly equal to the kinetic energy of about 900 cars traveling at 100 kilometers per hour, or enough to heat the water for nearly 2,000 liters of coffee," Scientific American reported.

The goal of the more than 5,000 scientists, engineers and students working on the project is to pass a number of milestones with the LHC—from one beam to two beams to colliding beams; from lower energies to the terascale; from weaker test intensities to stronger ones suitable for producing data at useful rates but more difficult to control, according to Scientific American. As the LHC ramps up, it is expected to work as an incredibly powerful microscope, allowing researchers to peer into the physics of the shortest distances (down to a nano-nanometer) and the highest energies ever probed.

CERN's next target is to increase the beam intensity to provide "meaningful proton-proton collision rates," the lab said in a news release. The current intensity level was chosen as a stepping stone, so that scientists could ensure that higher intensities can be safely handled and that stable conditions can be guaranteed for the experiments during collisions.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek echoed a common sentiment last year when he mentioned in Scientific American's LHC special report that the device could produce "a golden age of physics."

[Pat McCotter]

LHC back after temporary unexistence
'Pre-cycling interruptus' delays return

By Lewis Page
Posted in Physics, 3rd December 2009 10:53 GMT

The Large Hadron Collider - mightiest particle-smasher ever built, and possible portal to other dimensions - came back online late last night following a power cut which not only shut down the Collider but also caused it to vanish off the internet for a time.

Amateur LHC-watchers, observing the great machine either for pleasure or in trepidation lest it destroy the world and/or universe in some kind of horrendous black-hole planet implosion/world-soupening event etc, were startled to see most of the great machine's webpages, cams and such suddenly vanish in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Many a tinfoilclad LHC-doomsday prophet will doubtless have found his* nether garments embrowned as the entire facility seemed to have disappeared instantaneously, perhaps foreshadowing a similar imminent fate for the rest of humanity. In fact, the blackout affecting much of the Meyrin site above the LHC's underground tunnel complex - including the main computer centre, hence the web vanishment - was caused by a blown 18 kilovolt power connection.

Diesel backup generators immediately cut in, keeping the all-important cryogenic machinery around the mighty machine's circuit powered up. The Collider's 27 kilometres of magnetic vacuum-pipe must be kept within a hair of absolute zero in order to function, and had they warmed up to any significant degree it would have been a time-consuming job to get them back in order. Should such a "quench" scenario occur with beams up and burning, the energy release would be equivalent to the facility being rammed by an aircraft carrier - though the beams can be instantly "dumped" into special cooled, shielded graphite buffers if cooling is lost.

Fortunately no such disaster occurred, and by lunchtime yesterday adequate power supplies had been restored. However, various different bits and pieces around the complex had developed collywobbles of one kind and another following the outage ("pre-cycling interruptus" was mentioned) and control-room boffins were compelled to repeatedly move back their forecast restart time - happily for us meaning that our news-breaking report yesterday remained correct.

As of 2215 Swiss time last night, weary scientists managed to finally get a beam circulating once more, though various technical hitches continued to bedevil the machine through the night.

Prior to the mishap, the next event of interest was scheduled to be low-energy collisions at a mild 450 giga-electron-volts on Friday afternoon, but this is likely to be revised. In any event, collisions up to almost 1000 GeV have been carried out routinely at the US Tevatron for years, so neither radical new science nor planetary apocalypse can be expected from them.

Still, record-breaking beam energies have already been achieved at the LHC. Collisions at unprecedented power - and with them beezer new science, perhaps even the hotly anticipated dimensional portal event - may yet be on the menu before Xmas.

We'll keep you posted.

*Mostly his, we believe

[JonM]

They'll probably do their biggest test on December 21st, 2012.

[Lloyd Danforth]