LHC - Large Hadron Collider » Physics

World’s Largest Particle Collider Back In Action

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:52:34 +0000

The world’s largest particle collider is back in business. The Large Hadron Collider broke down last fall. It has taken a year to repair, but this month it began smashing again at record energies. Scientists at CERN, Europe’s particle physics lab, are eagerly preparing for a new era in the field.

It’s the middle of the night in a room that looks like mission control. There are huge flat screen monitors lining the walls, and about a dozen people are watching those monitors carefully. But instead of looking up, this mission control is looking down. About 300 feet below is a detector the size of a five-story building.

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LHC: progress in commissioning proton beams

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:47:14 +0000

After becoming the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the LHC is now making progress in commissioning stable beams and providing more collisions at the four points for several hours at a time. For the first time, beams have circulated with more than one bunch of protons, thus increasing the intensity.

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Large Hadron Collider Makes History with 1.18 TeV Protons

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:39:48 +0000

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.

In the early hours of Monday morning local time, the LHC accelerated protons to a record-breaking 1.18 TeV (tera-electronvolts). The previous record sat at 0.98 TeV and was achieved by Fermilab’s Tevatron in Illinois back in 2001.

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Large Hadron Collider sends beams in 2 directions

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:02:55 +0000

The world’s largest atom smasher made another leap forward Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.

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Large Hadron Collider ready to restart

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:42:18 +0000

Collected below are some photographs of the repairs, and of the LHC and some of its experiments in various stages of construction. (30 photos total)

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A Tumultuous Year at the LHC

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:37:53 +0000

On October 21, 2008, in accordance with some overly optimistic scheduling, 1,500 physicists and world leaders gathered outside Geneva to celebrate the inauguration of the biggest, most international, most expensive, most energetic, most ambitious experiment ever built. I enjoyed the day, which was filled with speeches, music, and—as is important at any European cultural event—good food. And despite anxieties (more on that later), everyone was filled with hope that these experiments would shed light on some of the mysteries surrounding mass, the weakness of gravity, dark matter, and the forces of nature.

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The LHC Higgs Boson Hunter

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:16:13 +0000

Professor Jonathan Butterworth is an experimental particle physicist at University College London (UCL), and a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

As his team prepares for the re-start of the most complex experiment mankind has ever conceived, Discovery News producer Ian O’Neill manages to catch Prof. Butterworth between TV interviews to chat about micro-black holes, spin-off technologies and why he’s not a big fan of the Higgs boson.

You can follow Prof. Butterworth’s work on the frontier of accelerator physics in a series of short films called “Colliding Particles — Hunting the Higgs.”

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What Will the LHC Find?

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:52:09 +0000

With the Large Hadron Collider almost ready to turn on, it’s time to prepare ourselves for what it might find. (The real experts, of course, have been preparing themselves for this for many years!) Chad Orzel was asked what we should expect from the LHC, and I thought it would be fun to give my own take. So here are my judgments for the likelihoods that we will discover various different things at the LHC — to be more precise, let’s say “the chance that, five years after the first physics data are taken, most particle physicists will agree that the LHC has discovered this particular thing.” (Percentages do not add up to 100%, as they are in no way exclusive; there’s nothing wrong with discovering both supersymmetry and the Higgs boson.) I’m pretty sure that I’ve never proposed a new theory that could be directly tested at the LHC, so I can be completely unbiased, as there’s no way that this experiment is winning any Nobels for me. On the other hand, honest particle phenomenologists might be aware of pro- or con- arguments for various of these scenarios that I’m not familiar with, so feel free to chime in in the comments. (Other predictions are easy enough to come by, but none with our trademark penchant for unrealistically precise quantification.)

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Cern lab set for beam milestone

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:50:58 +0000

Engineers had previously brought a beam of protons – tiny, sub-atomic particles – to the “doorstep” of the LHC.

On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time.
The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC will re-create the conditions present in the Universe just after the Big Bang.
There are over 5,000 magnets arranged end-to-end in a ring that runs for 27km through a giant tunnel under the French Swiss border.

CERN and the LHC

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:29:33 +0000

The long awaited Large Hadron Collider
is almost ready for it’s first proton beam. I think that all the scientists at CERN are about to reveal some really cool stuff in the next couple of years. They will be firing up the LHC sometime in the next couple of weeks and will begin their quest to answer some long lived questions.

LHC experiments will address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the Universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the Universe’s existence. – CERN, LHC Milestones