I'd like to be there when they fire it off. Nothing better than cutting EDGE.
BLEED!
Large Hadron Collider to restart in November
Summary
After a year of setbacks, CERN plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider in November at a tempo that won't overtax the machinery behind the giant particle physics experiment.
Topics
(Credit: Michael Hoch/CERN)
After a year of setbacks, CERN plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider in November at a tempo that won't overtax the machinery behind the giant particle physics experiment.
The collider, located deep underground on the border between France and Switzerland, will start out running at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam, about half the energy that CERN expects eventually. The physicists will inject and capture high-energy beams running in each direction on the circular collider's 17-mile circumference, log data over a number of weeks, and simply get themselves up to speed on the systems.
"We've selected 3.5 TeV to start," Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, said in a statement Thursday, "because it allows the LHC operators to gain experience of running the machine safely while opening up a new discovery region for the experiments."
The experiment that CERN--the European Organization for Nuclear Research--has in mind are nothing short of grandly ambitious. The collision of subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider could offer insights into the very earliest workings of the universe.
And the machinery is immensely complex, with 10,000 high-current superconducting electrical connections. The collider has cost $9 billion and taken 15 years to get to where it is now, according to an article earlier this week in The New York Times.
It was one of those electrical connections that misfired shortly after the collider was turned on for the first time in September 2008, causing CERN to curtail operations while it moved on to investigate and repair the the initial problems--and then subsequent troubles--and to plan its next steps. Tests of the collider's copper stabilizer wrapped up satisfactorily last week, meaning "no more repairs are necessary for safe running this year and next," CERN announced Thursday.
"The LHC is a much better understood machine than it was a year ago," Heuer said. "We can look forward with confidence and excitement to a good run through the winter and into next year."
After a significant data sample has been collected running the LHC at 3.5 TeV per beam, CERN said it would move toward 5 TeV and, at the end of 2010, would introduce lead ions for the first time.
Then it will be time to shut down the collider once again as CERN gets ready to get the machinery running at 7 TeV. ("1 TeV," says CERN's glossary, "is about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.")
This article was originally posted on CNET News.
Talkback Most Recent of 9 Talkback(s)
-
Intellihence7th Aug 2009 -
Detector
That is actually a detector not a coil....
gogalthorp7th Aug 2009 -
RE: Large Hadron Collider to restart in November
will it cure cancer, solve world hunger, clean the oceans, ready set bang.. DUST! what a waste of money!
devox10th Aug 2009 -
Think before you speak.
Maybe it will. First off, $9 billion isn't going to solve world hunger. I'm pretty sure the U.S. dumps hundreds of millions of dollars to aid starving countries every year and it hasn't done ****. If we can understand the molecules that we are made up of better, we can probably help cure cancer and figure out ways to clean the ocean. Money doesn't solve our problems.. science will. The more we learn, the faster we can solve our problems.
Hiveon10th Aug 2009 -
lol.
"U.S. dumps hundreds of millions of dollars to aid starving countries every year and it hasn't done ****."
Yes, US of A has spend a lot of billion of dollars in several fields:
-Pharmaceutics.
-Military (you knowns, poor people needs weapons!).
-Politician.
-Private foundations that spend most of their resources in administrative tasks.
-Pseudo ecologist groups (Greenpeace for example) with a success rate of 5%.
magallanes14th Aug 2009 -
Hunger
Well, at the moment, total world food production
sums up at around 3000 Calories per person on
average - more than the required minimum. What we
need is to properly distribute it.
MetzM15th Aug 2009 -
Wait Dude
Hivean is right, Science is the best chance we have to cure cancer, feed the starving, and clean the oceans.
Short-sighted people are the biggest problem in this world and no amount of money will fix that problem.
Hal_900111th Aug 2009 -
The worth of pure science
You never know quite what scientific research will bring you. CERN itself is a major centre for attempts to produce power through nuclear fusion (tho' the LHC is not directly part of that project).
If we do get fusion power will that help clean the oceans? Well, it will help with the problem of the nuclear waste produced by fission.
Even more directly, how can understanding the way atoms work possibly help cure cancer? Well, for starters try asking cancer researchers if they want to do without CT scans, or MRI scans or electron microscopes or all the other technologies which come directly from the sort of sub-atomic research work undertaken at CERN.
You might also care to remember the work of a scientist at this self-same CERN who wanted a better way to communicate scientific research work quickly, efficiently and to anyone regardless of their technological setup. His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and it was his effort to solve this problem which gave us the worldwide web, which you are using to rubbish scientific investigation.
pvsutton11th Aug 2009 -
Connections...
>It was one of those electrical connections that misfired
shortly...
Yeah, they should have used the GOOD wire nuts, the kind
with the metal coil inside and the fluted outside.
ProfQuill14th Aug 2009
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
Facebook Activity
