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16/07/30/1727225 story

The LHC Takes a Break Before Heading to New Heights

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 31 2016, @03:55AM   
from the just-chillin' dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been on Olympic form recently. In just two months, the accelerator delivered almost five times as much data as in the whole of 2015, smashing one record after another for luminosity, i.e. the number of collisions. The counter for integrated luminosity, which indicates the cumulative number of collisions delivered to the experiments, is approaching 20 inverse femtobarns (fb^-1), not far from the 25 fb^-1 target for 2016 as a whole! This is great news for the experiments, which have been able to add data to their analyses ahead of presenting their latest results at the ICHEP 2016 conference (International Conference on High-Energy Physics), which begins in a week's time in Chicago in the United States.

The LHC operators have been clocking up long periods of operation, during which the beams have been circulating and colliding without a single hiccup along the way. You might think that the operators just sit there twiddling their thumbs while the beams circulate, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The LHC is operating so well thanks to their constant checks and adjustments, which improve the operation of the accelerator and its thousands of components. And sometimes they stop the collisions altogether to carry out detailed studies of the accelerator, as is the case this week. Twenty days each year are devoted to these so-called machine development periods.

After six days of studies, the LHC will resume its collision marathon next Monday.

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Original Submission

• downtime is unacceptable downtime is unacceptable (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:05AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:05AM (#382162)

  The shareholders demand the Large Hadron Collider be replaced immediately by a Large Hadron Cloud which will never need maintenance and will never ever have downtime.

  • Re:downtime is unacceptable Re:downtime is unacceptable (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:47AM (#382167)

    And I want the whole thing replaced overnight. Tonight. While I'm sleeping. Get to work!

    Parent

    • Re:downtime is unacceptable (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:59AM (#382170)

      haha

      Parent

• Femtobarns? (Score: 2) by fishybell on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:30AM

  by fishybell (3156) on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:30AM (#382176)

  Femtobarns, really? I think they're just making this stuff up now.

  ...oh wait, I see, it's inverse femtobarns. Carry on.

• Inverse femtobarn (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:30AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:30AM (#382177)

  That sounded like an odd unit of measure. A barn [wikipedia.org] is a unit of area, equivalent to 100 square femtometres in SI units, roughly equivalent to the size of a typical atomic nucleus, a target the size of a "broad side of a barn" to particle physicists, who are generally aiming at even smaller targets than that. A femtobarn is thus 10^-15 barns or 10^-43 square metres. An inverse femtobarn generally refers to the number of particle collision events that an apparatus can produce within a femtobarn area. Fermilab's record at its peak was something like 10 inverse femtobarns.

• Eurotard hypocrites (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @09:48PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @09:48PM (#382846)

  BARNS???? Why aren't they using the holy SI units??