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Large Hardon Collider hard at work

ninjet

Bluelighter
Joined
Aug 15, 2008
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107
It's amazing to see how much progress is being made despite the setbacks that have came up....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11711228

This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

8o8o

my only questions is, is it REALLY a safe and controlled environment if your dealing with such extreme temps and possible unknowns?
 
^The best minds in the world are working there... trust me, they know what they're doing. Just because you don't know the mechanisms that are involved, doesn't mean they don't either.
 
It's safe. The amount of material and its mass taht they are dealing with are so tiny and transient that none of the forces (eg strong force) they are studying are capable of interacting with the environment. Those forces are so tiny that they only affect things on a subatomic scale. For example, the force the article mentions holds neutrons and protons together. If something is farther away than a proton and neutron are in the nucleus of an atom (>1.75×10−15 m or so), it won't be affected. Maybe zorn will elaborate.
 
^ They buffer the heat by cooling down the magnets to an operable range of 1.5K. It is a gigantic cryogenic facility. The heat isn't created on a massive scale in terms of how far a high mean temperature spreads, so it too dissipates.
 
It's safe. The amount of material and its mass taht they are dealing with are so tiny and transient that none of the forces (eg strong force) they are studying are capable of interacting with the environment. Those forces are so tiny that they only affect things on a subatomic scale. For example, the force the article mentions holds neutrons and protons together. If something is farther away than a proton and neutron are in the nucleus of an atom (>1.75×10−15 m or so), it won't be affected. Maybe zorn will elaborate.

Yeah. The thing to keep in mind about the LHC, or any collider, is that they're colliding particles, more or less one at a time.* And a particle is very, very, very, very small. :) There are an assload of particles in even the tiniest speck of dust. So even though the collisions can produce extremely hot "fireballs," and the particles move at extremely high energies compared with other particles, the actual amount of energy in a single particle or collision is still incredibly tiny by everyday standards.

At the LHC, the design goal is to get the particles up to 7 trillion "electron-volts." (Right now they're at half that, but the ion collisions they're currently doing make it larger.) That means the amount of energy an electron would have if you charged it up to 7,000,000,000,000 volts. (!) So that's a ton compared with the 120 or 240-volt electrons in your electric wiring, or the measly half electron-volt energy of the particles in an acetylene torch flame. But to put it another way: that's ten billion times smaller than the energy stored in a single AA battery. So as far as safety, etc, the collisions and resulting fireballs are totally trivial... they're microscopic.



There's plenty of power at the LHC is though. The individual collisions are tiny, but the particle beams are not. Each beam has about the same energy (400 million Joules) as an aircraft carrier steaming along at ~10 mph or so, enough to melt a half-ton of copper. As you might guess this means the beams can be very, very damaging. The accelerator is located underground, so when the beam is "dumped" it is absorbed harmlessly by the earth. A screw-up controlling the beam could, though, potentially send it through some of the detectors or other equipment, frying some extremely expensive stuff.

And the real awe-inspiring things are the superconducting magnets, which are what power & guide the particles in the accelerator. When the accelerator is running at full power, they contain a huge amount of energy in their magnetic fields -- the same amount of energy as a fully-loaded Boeing 747 cruising at full speed (almost 600 mph.) It's insane.

(The accident that knocked out the LHC for most of last year was related to the magnets. One of the electric connections to the magnets was not quite tight enough, and when it developed a tiny resistance the huge current through the magnet instantly fried it. The resulting "quench" of the magnet blew a hole in the cooling system and released two tons of helium; the pressure tumbled several of the 35-ton magnets off their supports.)

read more:
http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/magnets.htm
http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm
http://blogs.uslhc.us/what-does-7-tev-mean
 
^ They buffer the heat by cooling down the magnets to an operable range of 1.5K. It is a gigantic cryogenic facility. The heat isn't created on a massive scale in terms of how far a high mean temperature spreads, so it too dissipates.

Just to make it clear.... the cryogenic cooling has nothing to do with buffering or controlling the heat of the collisions. The heat produced in each collision is tiny; it would take a thousand of collisions to heat a single grain of sand a single degree. There are a lot of collisions, but even so, the amount of heat produced by collisions each second is about the same as that produced by the fall when you knock a bag of sugar off the kitchen table. It's not a lot.

The cryogenics is to keep the magnets cold enough to be superconducting. To accelerate and guide the particles in the LHC you need ginormous magnetic fields, meaning huge amounts of electric current. If you tried to run that much current through a regular magnet you'd melt it instantly. So they need to be superconducting, and current materials are only superconducting when they're kept very cold.
 
Is that a typo in the thread title or do you have a problem with the thing!? ^ I guess not or I'm sure we'd have heard about it.
 
Have they found what they were looking for yet?

Hopefully not; confirmation of the predictions of the standard model would be the worst possible outcome for the LHC (aside from the damn thing blowing up). You don't spend god-knows how many billions of euros on a machine that confirms what you already knew.
 
Actually, the repercussions would be 'worse' than that; namely, that the Standard Model fails to account for some phenomena, and so if it were confirmed, this would imply the the universe isn't able to be understood. Or so it would appear.

I do not expect it to be confirmed. Nor do I think it will get us any closer to a GUT, as I reckon that's the wrong way of looking at it. Fortunately, this view is becoming increasingly popular.
 
Actually, the repercussions would be 'worse' than that; namely, that the Standard Model fails to account for some phenomena, and so if it were confirmed, this would imply the the universe isn't able to be understood. Or so it would appear.

to me that sounds like a strange statement. is anything fully understood? no because there is always more to learn, but can things be known? yes because we can use our science and mathmatics to make predictions that are fulfilled, or maybe im just not quite understanding what your trying to say.
 
Annoyed at Maher's "New Rules" this week, as he criticized the work being done by CERN. I'm not even sure why.. I think he had one foot out the door, as this was the season finale.
 
^ Just saw him live. Funny as hell... I cant remember the last time I laughed almost continuously for 90 mins.

BUT he is rather an egotistical asshole who really does seem to believe he is smarter and knows better than EVERYONE about EVERYTHING.

I am not not surprised he is too dumb to comprehend the details of particle physics and realize what we stand to gain from learning more and more details about the ultimate fine structure of matter and spacetime, such as virtually free pollution free energy. With his total utter lack of understanding of the science or its benefits, I imagine it just seems like some big kooky pointless jobs program.

Maybe some of his more scientifically literate fans will set him straight.

Thanks for the heads-up... I will have to watch that episode. Perhaps I will be pissed off enough to be the one to email him a wake-up slap, haha!

I encourage you to do so, as well, Cyc.
 
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