from the still-waiting-on-the-grapefruit-collider dept.
Wired reports the LHC is back to full strength after running at half power for years to prevent another accident like that which took it down in 2008:
In the fall of 2008, CERN’s high-energy physicists ran into a problem. A faulty electronic connection at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland—the biggest, baddest, most powerful particle accelerator ever built—caused a couple of magnets to overheat and melt, triggering an explosion of pressurized helium gas. The accident, which happened just nine days after the LHC turned on for the first time, led to months of delays. “It was pretty depressing when we broke the accelerator,” says Aaron Dominguez, a physicist at the University of Nebraska. “That was not a good day.”
Eventually, engineers fixed the LHC, and in 2012, physicists used it to do what the accelerator was always supposed to: Find the elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. It worked, earning much fanfare and a Nobel Prize. But to prevent another accident, CERN’s engineers had run the LHC at only half its designed capability. Now, after a two-year hiatus in which engineers upgraded the accelerator to prevent such magnetic meltdowns, the LHC is set to smash protons together harder than ever—the way it was intended. “It’s like having a new accelerator, really,” Dominguez says. The increased power will mean more violent collisions that might create bigger, even rarer particles...
protons will finally begin slamming together, hopefully creating particles that physicists have only theorized to exist. At first, the collisions will be at 13 TeV. Only later, once engineers get a better feel for how the machine works, will they boost it to its maximum of 14 TeV. And higher energies mean more particles. The first run produced 500,000 Higgs bosons, but detectors only identified a few hundred of them for physicists to study. With more collisions, the LHC should create 10 times as many Higgs bosons. More data could be the key to discovering all kinds of new physics. The Higgs, for example, might be responsible for dark energy, the force that’s causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
I for one am looking forward to the flying cars and invisibility powers this will finally bring us.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday March 26 2015, @11:29PM
Flying cars and invisibility are SIDE EFFECTS of the maximum improbability event horizon that results, right?
I await space-time being treated like silly-putty.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 5, Funny) by tathra on Friday March 27 2015, @03:28AM
has it destroyed the world yet? [hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Thursday March 26 2015, @11:35PM
Actually the startup has been delayed by an intermittent short circuit in one of the magnets. It may be easily fixed by flushing out the debris, but if they have to fully warm the magnet up to room temperature it'll take more time (weeks to months).
http://www.nature.com/news/cern-battles-short-circuit-behind-lhc-delay-1.17186?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews [nature.com]
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday March 27 2015, @12:05AM
Worth waiting for, for sure!
Little known fact: Tho' called the LARGE Hadron Collider, it's just as good colliding small hadrons, too!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @03:30AM
Magnets, how the fuck do they work?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday March 27 2015, @02:18PM
"Magnets, how the fuck do they work?"
Not very well, in this case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @05:12AM
I was chatting to one of the CERN guys on Wednesday about this. It is one month to warm up the magnets, then they switch for a spare, then two months to cool down again (to ~5 Kelvin). They have to warm up the entire sector (1/8 of the ring) to make one repair. Sucks to be superconducting!
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday March 26 2015, @11:36PM
Who else than physicists can go to the boss and say:
"Dude, I theorized that there's a cool thing inside these black boxes that makes them work. The boxes are locked, so we should smash them together until pieces fly out. Can I get a few billions, a team of top-notch engineers, and a massive amount of land, in the Alps, between France and Switzerland?"
ITER is not too far:
"Dude, what if we built a Tokamak, like, massively bigger, like huge! I'm sure we could get closer to controlled fission. Produce energy? Maybe. But really we'll need an even bigger one for that, let's leave that for later... Can I get a few billions, a team of top-notch engineers, and a good chunk of land in Provence? ... What? Northern Japan? Sure, it's cheaper, but you do have to attend all the on-site meetings, you know... Provence it is!"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @12:28AM
if you ever owned an old glass tube TV set, you too have operated a particle accelerator.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday March 27 2015, @12:36AM
I routinely enslave subatomic particles and force them to bask me in light and sounds, sometimes even coherent light.
And talking about light, I routinely use a thermonuclear clothes dryer...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hubie on Friday March 27 2015, @01:29AM
Of course, when you smash those black boxes together, you get out a whole bunch more boxes out than you started with.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @12:21AM
https://i.imgur.com/iCSy8Q9.jpg [imgur.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @12:30AM
So it's not back to full power, it's 13/14 or about 93%.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Friday March 27 2015, @06:42PM
That's 2 or 3 better than 11.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @12:46AM
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_6483.jpg [clubhack.com]
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_6415.jpg [clubhack.com]
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_6402.jpg [clubhack.com]
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_6309.jpg [clubhack.com]
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/DSC_6317.jpg [clubhack.com]
http://www.clubhack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Bruce2.png [clubhack.com]
evidence is clear of his superpowers!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday March 27 2015, @12:58AM
Mad scientists will carve an event horizon into the Switzer-French land.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 27 2015, @01:58AM
they're smashing protons with antiprotons.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @03:33AM
Anti-protons are still protons, they're just going backwards in time.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @05:17AM
No they really are protons.
Fermilab's tevatron had proton antiproton collider but it was a pain in the ass to make antiprotons - they had to do all sorts of beam cooling to get the thing to work and it took a long time to bring the machine up to full luminosity. At these energies the gain by using antiprotons is not so great - the collision products don't care what the ~ 2 GeV/c^2 of matter at the start was when you have 14000 GeV of collision energy to play with - so long as matter is made up of quarks that's enough.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday March 27 2015, @08:36AM
you ignorant clod
Aren't you a charmer?
Every authorative source on the subject I can find only mentions protons, not anti-protons.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday March 27 2015, @12:17PM
You can watch the thing in operation here: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html [cyriak.co.uk]