LHC to run for longest continuous period
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On Wednesday, Steve Myers, the LHC's director for accelerators and technology, blogged that Cern had decided last week to run the giant particle collider for 18-24 months at a collision energy of seven tera-electron-volts (TeV) — or 3.5 TeV per beam — with the powering-up phase starting later this month.
After that, the LHC will "go into a long shutdown in which we'll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC's design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run", Myers wrote.
The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, designed to smash two beams of protons into each other at unprecedented energies around a 27km-long tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border. The aim is to learn more about physical laws and the nature of matter.
Cern, which runs the LHC, has since used the machine to set a world record for particle acceleration — in November 2009, it reached a beam intensity of 1.18 TeV.
For more on this story, read LHC to run for longest continuous period on ZDNet UK.
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boson, it'll turn physics on its head; if they don't find the
Higgs boson, it'll turn physics on its had.
It's going to be exciting either way. I can't wait for the
results.
ignited fusion reaction sometime in 2012.
Exciting times in science, that's for sure.
Considering fusion would be a massive, clean source of power that would rid ourselves of security and resource problems around the world, provide the US with a something to export, create tons of jobs, and reduce the cost of energy in this country, I'm really dissapointed that this country is not more excited about getting it to work.
I guess we don't have the attention span to complete a decades long project without losing interest.
incredible. This seems like something both sides of the fence would be
able to get behind and support. It's as green as you can get, it's
relatively cheap to produce once it gets going, and it's a potential global
cash cow.
I'm floored that it isn't getting all the funding it needs, the potential
benefits from any investment in the project are astronomical.
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