LHC HAS BECOME THE WORLD'S HIGHEST-ENERGY PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

The LHC pushed this weekend the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.

The previous record was held by the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago.

Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts. On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this "pilot beam", reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT. The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001. The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts.

The official shedule is to increase progressively the energy of the beams and, in few days time, to start with the first collisions. Abundant collisions will be generated in the four big detectors. This collisions will allow engineers and physicists to calibrate these detectors. When the LHC is fully operational, 600 million of collisions  of protons per second will be generated.

Unless anything unexpected happens, the LHC will reach next year a energy of 3,5 TeV per beam, and physicists think that,then, they will be able to get the first scientific data.


More:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/ 

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7543089.stm

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LHC WORKS AGAIN!!

Engineers first circulated a beam around the LHC on 10 September 2008 but , few days later, the machine was heavily damaged when an electrical fault caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel just nine days after it was first launched. During 14 months of repairs dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate particles at the speed of light had to be replaced. This extra year also had allowed researchers to upgrade instrumentation and computer software.

Progress on restarting the machine went more quickly than expected on Friday. It was not anticipated that engineers would try to circulate a proton beam until 6am on Saturday at the earliest. However, two stable proton beams had already been circulated in opposite directions around the machine by midnight (GMT) on Friday. Operations team members spent Saturday injecting protons into the LHC's 27km-long "ring", attempting to improve the lifetime of the beams.

 

Tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN) with all the Magnets and Instuments. The shown part of the tunnel is located under the LHC P8, near the LHCb ( Author: Julian Herzog, Wikipedia Commons)

Engineers had discussed the possibility of attempting to increase the collider's energy to a record-breaking level of 1.2 trillion electron volts this weekend. Only the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago has so far approached this energy, operating at just under one trillion electron volts. Nevertheless, this plan now looks unlikely. Instead, engineers will probably concentrate on preparing the machine for its first low-energy collisions, scheduled to happen in the next 10-15 days.

Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border and operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC  is the world's largest machine and will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang. During the experiment, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.

More:

http://technologytodream.blogspot.com/search/label/Physics%20-%20LHC

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7543089.stm

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LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

Today has begun the experiment called Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This experiment is located in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and is considered the scientific experiment of this century. It has costed 3000 millions euros and, in order to build it, more than 10000 scientists have taken part. This experiment has been built in a circular tunnel 27km long in the border between France and Switzerland depths, at between 50 and 120 meters under the floor.

LHC architecture and its experiments

The LHC is really an enormous particle accelerator which constitutes the most powerful machine ever built by physicians. This accelerator will make possible collisions of high energy protons at almost the speed of light. The main goal of this high energy collisions is to discover the hypothetical Higgs boson, which is predicted by the Standard Model of elemental particles.

These are the four main experiments in the LHC:

- CMS (the Compact Muon Solenoid) - and Atlas are the LHC's general purpose detectors to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the elusive Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter, which gives other particles their mass. Atlas will be responsible for the search of dark matter.

CMS detector for LHC

- The LHC Beauty (LHCb) detector is designed to answer a specific question: where did all the anti-matter go? Equal amounts of matter and its opposite counterpart anti-matter were created in the Big Bang. But today we find no evidence of, for example, anti-matter galaxies or stars. The LHCb experiment will help us to understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

- ALICE While the other LHC detectors will use proton beams to do their science, Alice relies on smashing together electrically charged lead atoms. Scientists hope to re-create a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma which existed just after the Big Bang.Matter was in this "liquid" state because the early Universe was still extremely hot.The Alice detector will be used to study this quark-gluon plasma as it expands and cools. In doing so, they will observe how it progressively gives rise to the particles that make up the matter in our Universe today.

Concerning the LHC there are some scientists who are afraid the LHC could cause the end of the world. Experts deny that dangerous black holes could be generated in the LHC. The LHC, like other particle accelerators, recreates the natural phenomena of cosmic rays under controlled laboratory conditions. As this natural phenomena has been happening for millions of years and the Earth still exists, there is no reason, as I see it, to be worried about it.

To know more:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7534847.stm

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

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