The Large Hadron Rap: We All Learn Differently!

CERN Announces Start-Up Date for LHC

The following article is a CERN Press Release dated August 7, 2008. The original press release can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

Geneva, 7 August 2008. CERN1 has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of the start-up will be made available through Eurovision.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.

Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine.

By the end of July, this work was approaching completion, with all eight sectors at their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). The next phase in the process is synchronization of the LHC with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC’s injector chain. Timing between the two machines has to be accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond. A first synchronization test is scheduled for the weekend of 9 August, for the clockwise-circulating LHC beam, with the second to follow over the coming weeks. Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for 2008. Force majeure notwithstanding, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).

Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier.

‘We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,’ said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. ‘It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.’

CERN will be issuing regular status updates between now and first collisions. Journalists wishing to attend CERN for the first beam on 10 September must be accredited with the CERN press office. Since capacity is limited, priority will be given to news media. The event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch/, and distributed through the Eurovision network. Live stand up and playout facilities will also be available.

A media centre will be established at the main CERN site, with access to the control centres for the accelerator and experiments limited and allocated on a first come first served basis. This includes camera positions at the CERN Control Centre, from where the LHC is run. Only television media will be able to access the CERN Control Centre. No underground access will be possible.

For further information and accreditation procedures: http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam

1 CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Large Hadron Collider could unlock secrets of the Big Bang

The following article is from the UK Telegraph, July 4, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Richard Gray, UK Telegraph Science Correspondent -- As the world's largest and most expensive science experiment, the new particle accelerator buried 300ft beneath the Alpine foothills along the Swiss French border is 17 miles long and up to 12 stories high. It is designed to generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade.

The £4.4 billion machine - the Large Hadron Collider - is aiming to unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

Scientists will use it to try to recreate the conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, by smashing pieces of atoms together at high speed.

The Sunday Telegraph joined the scientist Peter Higgs, a professor of particle physics at Edinburgh University, whose 40-year-old theories about an elusive particle known as the Higgs boson may finally be proved as part of the huge experiment, as he toured the site for the first time.

This weekend will be the last time visitors will be given access to the tunnel that houses the accelerator ring. From tomorrow, it will be completely closed off while technicians make the final preparations before it is turned on in July when, it is hoped, it will begin revealing what the matter and energy that created the universe was really like. What happens afterwards could change our understanding of the world. Most experts believe the explosions created when the particles hit each other will reveal the basic building blocks of everything around us. There are some, however, who fear it could destroy the planet.

A lawsuit filed last week by environmentalists in Hawaii is seeking a restraining order preventing the European Nuclear Research Centre from switching it on for fear it could create a black hole that will suck up all life on Earth.

"The Large Hadron Collider is like a time machine that is going to take us further back towards the Big Bang than we have ever been before by recreating the conditions that existed there.

"We are going to see new types of matter we haven't been able to see before," said Professor Frank Close, a particle physicist at Oxford University.

"The idea that it could cause the end of the world is ridiculous."

Housed in a subterranean lair that would provide a suitable home for a Hollywood super-villain, it is hardly surprising there are conspiracy theories surrounding the work being carried out on the collider.

The tunnel is large enough to drive a train through and so long that the curve is barely noticeable. To reach it requires a two-minute lift journey from ground level. Down below the scene is a mass of cables, tubes, electronics and metal panels.

Atomic particles will spiral though a series of rings, lined with powerful magnets that will accelerate the particles till they reach close to the speed of light. Each particle will race around the 17-mile route 11,245 times every second before being smashed headlong into each other, breaking them into their component parts, releasing huge amounts of energy and debris.

The temperatures produced by these collisions will be 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun and scientists believe this will be powerful enough to reveal the first particles that existed in the moments immediately after the birth of the universe.

This massive experiment will create more than 15 million gigabytes of data every year - the equivalent of 21.4 million CDs. The scientists have had to design a new form of the internet to cope with the data.

Six separate detectors have been positioned around the collider ring to allow scientists to examine what happens.

Among the particles they will hunt for is the Higgs boson, a cornerstone of modern physics that is thought to be responsible for giving every other particle its mass, or weight.

Immediately after the Big Bang all particles are thought to have had no mass. As the temperature cooled, the Higgs boson "stuck" to them, making them heavy. Some particles are more "sticky" than others and so gain more weight.

A massive detector known as Atlas is among those that will be hunting for the Higgs boson. As big as Canterbury Cathedral and weighing more than 100 747 jumbo jet aircraft, it is one of the most impressive parts of the collider.

Professor Jonathan Butterworth, a physicist at University College London who is among the UK scientists involved in the Atlas experiment, said: "If we find the Higgs boson then it will prove our standard model of particle physics.

"If we don't find it then nature may have another way of giving particles mass and that is going to turn science on its head."

Two elevator rides and a 10-minute car journey away on the other side of the giant accelerator, another part of the experiment, dubbed Alice, will recreate the superheated gas, or plasma, that existed when the universe was formed. The collider may also reveal more exotic phenomena such as anti-matter, the opposite of ordinary matter, mini black holes and even extra dimensions.

"At the level of energy we will be creating normal matter doesn't exist. I expect we will see some things that are entirely new and could turn our current understanding of physics on its head," said Dr David Evans, a physicist from Birmingham University who has been working on the Alice project.

"Answering these new questions will be more exciting than proving theories that already exist."

Collider May Provide Proof for String Theory of Physics

Physicist Brian Greene

The following article is from the Deseret Morning News, October 11, 2007. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Joe Bauman, Deseret Morning News Reporter — One of the most significant moments in the history of science may come after a new particle collider starts work this year beneath the Swiss-French border, according to a renowned physicist, Brian Greene.

The Large Hadron Collider just might prove that the controversial "theory of everything," string theory, is true.

Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, New York City, and author of best-selling books on string theory, spoke Tuesday at Brigham Young University's Marriott Center.

His book, The Elegant Universe, was developed into a three-part series broadcast by PBS. "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality," the title of his latest book, also was the name of the lecture.

"Space and time are the most familiar and yet most enigmatic concepts in science today," Greene said, but they are not what our senses would lead us to believe.

"We are learning that reality is not what we think it is. The very basis of existence is not what we think it is," he said.

At the turn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein asked himself how gravity worked. How could the sun reach across 93 million miles and affect the motion of Earth? He struggled with the question for 10 years.

By 1915, Einstein had come up with the General Theory of Relativity as an answer. Einstein pictured space-time as something like a big rubber sheet. When something massive, like the sun, weighs down a portion of the sheet, it causes a distortion in it, and a smaller object will roll around and around the pit.

"Einstein says take that idea and apply it to the cosmos," Greene said. Thus, a planet will circle the sun because the sun causes a deformation, like a pit, in the fabric of space-time.

Rather than static, fixed features, "space and time can actually do something. Space and time push things around," he said. Each person "affects the shape of space; in fact, the shape of time as well."

General Relativity works beautifully on the large scale. But scientists realized that Einstein's ideas were in conflict with another proven theory, that of quantum mechanics, which covers the very small scale.

"Quantum mechanics is a very mysterious, strange, really mind-boggling subject," Greene said.
Quantum effects have been proven in the laboratory. The ideas "are confirmed by experimental observation." A famous feature of quantum mechanics is that one may know one aspect of an electron, such as its speed, without being able to know another, such as its position — and vice versa.

On the large scale, Einstein's laws show the smooth, predictable actions of relatively big phenomena. But on a tiny scale, things are "chaotic," Greene said.
When Einstein's theories were applied to extremely small things, "the laws made wrong predictions."

String theory accommodates both sets of laws. It holds that each subatomic particle actually is an incredibly minute vibrating filament of energy. The frequency of the vibration determines whether the particle is a quark or an electron, for example.

Vibrating strings define space, time and everything in existence, many scientists believe. The theory "winds up fixing" the conflict between the laws of the large and the small.

But if string theory is correct, "it says something really wild," Greene said. It fails when restricted to our three spacial dimensions — up and down, left and right, front and back. "If that's all there is in space," he said, "this thing doesn't work."

Not until 10 spacial dimensions are used in the calculations do the equations work. But we perceive only three. Where are the others? They could be curled up within the normal dimensions, he said.

Greene asked the audience to imagine a piece of paper, essentially a two-dimensional object. When it is curled up and seen from a distance, it looks like a one-dimensional line. But if an ant were on it, the insect might find itself going back and forth in one dimension and around the tube of paper in another.

Peering through binoculars, a watcher might see the ant's circular sauntering and realize the paper has another dimension.

Understanding the nature of the paper "escaped you without the right equipment — the binoculars."

String theory may allow tiny curled-up dimensions to be everywhere, so small that we can't detect them. "We haven't seen them — yet," he said.

But the Large Hadron Collider being built near Geneva — an almost 17-mile circular tube built beneath the French-Swiss border, because it was cheaper to use land underground for such a massive structure — may provide proof of string theory. When it begins smashing rotating streams of protons together, the ideas may be verified.

"There's a chance ... that some of the debris from these collisions will be ejected out of our dimensions," and scientists may be able to discover "these missing energy signatures," he said. "If this is confirmed experimentally in the next few years, to me this would be one of the most significant moments in the history of science."

LHC Set for July Startup

The following article is from PhysicsWorld.com, March 28, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Jon Cartwright, PhysicsWorld.com Reporter -- Engineers at CERN are making the final touches to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the biggest experiment in particle physics — and expect to have it running in the first half of July. Although the start-up schedule of the European particle accelerator has slipped by over a month since the last official announcement, there appear to be only minor problems left to resolve.

“It has been some time since we’ve been in this kind of position with this kind of research facility,” says James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN. “There’s real confidence that we’ll be collecting new data this year. It’s a very big time for us.”

When all is done and dusted, the LHC will have cost around $6.3bn to build. Some 6000 superconducting magnets will whip proton beams in opposite directions around a 27 km-long ring and smash them together at energies bordering on 14 TeV. The impacts will generate a hoard of new particles, possibly including the highly anticipated Higgs particle and so-called supersymmetric particles. But regardless of what is or is not detected, it is almost certain that the LHC will provide a window onto new physics.

Until recently, the official line from CERN was that the first proton beams would be injected into the ring in May, despite status reports from the LHC website suggesting otherwise. According to Gillies, previous problems have now compelled CERN to set back the start up to the first half of July. An official date will be announced sometime after mid-June, the earliest time that all the magnets can be cooled to their operating temperature of below 2 K.

"There’s real confidence that we’ll be collecting new data this year. It’s a very big time for us." --James Gillies, CERN spokesman

Latent problems

The main problem that has dogged the LHC start-up schedule of late erupted with a bang this time last year, when one of the “quadrupole” magnets used to focus and manipulate the proton beams failed during preliminary tests. Fermilab, the US laboratory who manufactured the magnets, was quick to accept responsibility, but it soon became apparent that all similar magnets would have to be redesigned and replaced. CERN is still reeling from this overhaul, having had to delay the cooling of magnets and skip the low-energy test runs that were due to take place before winter.

There have since been other, less serious problems. Towards the end of last year CERN found that certain “copper fingers” used to ensure electrical continuity between magnets had buckled when the magnets were warmed up. Presently, LHC engineers are having a few difficulties with leaky plumbing of liquid helium, which is used to cool the magnets. “Superfluid helium has no viscosity, so it can find any cracks,” explains Gillies.

Even though proton beams will not enter the LHC before July, by May 21 the beams will be running through two of CERN’s existing particle accelerators, which are serving as preliminary accelerator stages. The Proton Synchrotron, built in the late 1950s, will speed the protons up to 25 GeV and feed into the Super Proton Synchrotron, built in the 1970s, to get them up to 450 GeV.

Wide media coverage

On the day when the LHC is ready to have its proton beams injected, onlookers can expect wide media coverage. According to Gillies, they will inject the first beam in one direction at 9:30am (central-Europe time) to tie in with a live broadcast from BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Visuals will show the beam’s progress while CERN scientists analyse it. Every 10 minutes, they will be able to send in another beam. “Hopefully we’ll get one circulating all the way round by the end of the day,” says Gillies. Once they have understood the circulation in one direction, the scientists will begin experimenting with counter-circulating beams. “Then we’ll ramp up the energies,” he adds.

In light of the huge public interest in the LHC, CERN is holding an open day for the accelerator on April 6. From April 2–7 the lab is also allowing US high-school students to visit and report back their experiences via blogs and videos.

It appears that the pangs of excitement are beginning to be felt at CERN. Still, few of those involved are counting their chickens just yet. “We have to cool the whole machine down first,” says LHC project leader Lyn Evans. “I hope that that can be achieved by mid-June so we can start taking data in July.”

Lawsuit: Huge Atom Smasher Could Destroy World

AP Black Hole Rendition

The following article is from Fox News, March 31, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Paul Wagenseil, Fox News Reporter -- Stop the scientists before they destroy us all!

That's what a Hawaii man with a background in nuclear physics is asking a court to do.
Walter F. Wagner and his colleague Luis Sancho have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop work on the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border that's set to start operations in May.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

Physicists hope its incredible energies will form briefly-lived new particles that could shed light on the origins of the universe, among other marvels.

The plaintiffs' concerns? That the LHC could accidentally create strange new particles that would instantly transform any matter they touched, engulfing the Earth, or, even worse, make a rapidly expanding black hole that could consume the entire planet.

"[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu.

"[A]ny matter coming into contact with it would fall into it and never be able to escape. Eventually, all of earth would fall into such growing micro-black-hole, converting earth into a medium-sized black hole, around which would continue to orbit the moon, satellites, the ISS, etc."

• Click here to read the text of the lawsuit.

Named as defendants are the U.S. Department of Energy, the venerable DOE-owned Fermilab particle-accelerator facility outside Chicago, the "Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN)" and the National Science Foundation.

(CERN's full name is actually the European Organization for Nuclear Research; "CERN" is the French acronym for an earlier name.)

The lawsuit wants the LHC's opening to be delayed for several months so that outside experts can read the facility's internal safety review, which was to have been completed by Jan. 1 of this year but does not appear to have been released.

Wagner has even put up a Web site at http://www.lhcdefense.org/ detailing his concerns.

Not included among the documents is Wagner's own indictment last month on identity-theft charges tied to an ongoing legal battle over a botanical garden on the Big Island of Hawaii, but you can read about that here.

Most physicists say Wagner's worries are unfounded. Micro black holes would evaporate nearly instantly instead of combining to form larger ones, they say, and the "strangelet" particles he frets would freeze the world would in fact fall apart quickly.

Wagner's own background is a bit fuzzy. He claims to have minored in physics at U.C. Berkeley, gone to law school, taught elementary-school science and worked in nuclear medicine at health facilities — but he doesn't appear to have an advanced degree in science.

Sancho's qualifications are even murkier, but the lawsuit identifies him as a Spanish citizen residing in the U.S., even if his presence makes the entire case a bit, um, quixotic.

Fears that atom smashers will destroy the world have been around for decades and seem to come to the fore every time a new well-publicized facility comes online.

But no particle accelerator has ever come close to the power of the Large Hadron Collider.