News LHC twitter!

[Cadelin]

As some of you may be aware the LHC experiment is starting up again. This weekend they are circulating the beams. We have now got further than last year when there was the accident.

You can see twitter updates here.

You can see the progress of the beam around the LHC ring here.

You can also look at the beam monitoring here.

There are some pictures from the control room here and here

 

[Jeros]

Well we all know everything will be fine!

 

[Jupitus]

Is that Bernie Ecclestone on the left, perhaps considering the ring for a new GP circuit???

 

[Cadelin]

And now a message from the DG too:

Geneva, 20 November 2009.
Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN*’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o'clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers.“We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.


“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”

A press conference will be held at CERN, at the Globe of Science and Innovation, at 2pm on Monday 23 November, and webcast at: Live webcast. Submit your questions to @CERN via Twitter. We cannot guarantee that all questions will be answered.

Follow LHC progress on twitter at CERN (CERN) on Twitter
For photos, video and latest information see: CERN Press Office | LHC First Physics - press resources
Contact : CERN Press Office - Contact us
*************************************************************************************************

 

[nath]

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

Something about the wording of that sentence reminds me of this:

xkcd store

 

[Cadelin]

Sorry for double post but we just saw the first beam splashes in ATLAS!

Dear Colleagues,

ATLAS has recorded successfully the first beam-splash events
of 2009. You can admire them at the following sites:

ATLAS event displays
https://atlas-live.cern.ch

Keep an eye on these sites, as they will be refreshed regularly.

This very exciting moment and great achievement for
the machine and our experiment are the results of the
outstanding work of many people !

 

[Tom]

These scientists are extremely reckless. Everyone knows that their experiments will cause the end of the wo

 

[Scouse]

*wants to post, but believes it will ruin tom's rather amusing jape*

 

[Embattle]

These scientists are extremely reckless. Everyone knows that their experiments will cause the end of the wo

Well least you'll be happy...end of the Labour government.

 

[rynnor]

I for one welcome the new Black Hole to be ideally situated between France n Switzerland

 

[Talyn]

A mate sent me this, which taught me a couple of new things about the LHC..

Large Hadron Collider - How does it work? - Snotr

It's about 6 mins long...

 

[Cadelin]

Just got this email:

Dear Colleagues,

ATLAS has just recorded first collision events at injection energy !
What an achievement ... and an emotion !

Our very efficient scanning team is posting event displays of first collisions here:

<Link Removed but you couldn't access it anyway>

The above page is protected. Please do not show the above events outside ATLAS until they are made public.

Kind regards


It seems the first collisions were recorded at around 14:22 today! I will update the link when the images can be shown to the public.

 

[Darthshearer]

Makes me think of the episode of Have I got news for you

"The collider"

hehe

 

[Lamp]

Hands up everyone who thinks the LHC is going to generate a black hole and suck itself to death ?

 

[Cadelin]

The official release:

Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimisation, followed by LHCb.

“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

“The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.

“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions,” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

Link to the collisions:
ATLAS event displays

 

[Jupitus]

A mate sent me this, which taught me a couple of new things about the LHC..

Large Hadron Collider - How does it work? - Snotr

It's about 6 mins long...

Great video, thanks!

Do they actually KNOW what will happen at the high end of the energy collisions?

 

[rynnor]

Hands up everyone who thinks the LHC is going to generate a black hole and suck itself to death ?

I dont think theres enough mass to sustain one - you might create some mini-ones that only exist for nano-seconds though.

Another idea I read is that some people theorise the earths core could contain a singularity and that any mini-ones created by the LHC could be attracted to it with potentially disastrous results.

Tbh - the one I like most is the idea of the planet being instantaneously converted to 'strange matter'.

On the plus side if a singularity did absorb France leaving a smoking hole the resulting inrush of the sea would lower sea levels so always a bright side for ye Global Warming believers

Edit - oh and how about a Kugelblitz from the energy concentration? I love that word

 

[Zenith.UK]

I for one am very glad that LHC is up and running properly. Enough money has been thrown at it's construction so it should start showing us some results now.

And if that means pretty pictures of shrapnel particles veering off through the calorimeters of the detectors, then I'm fine with that.
Besides, ATLAS have a better way of presenting their collision candidate than CMS... IMO.

In fact, I'm going to go off and play some "Another World" in WinUAE.

 

[Scouse]

In fact, I'm going to go off and play some "Another World" in WinUAE.

Windows United Arab Emirates version?!

Anyway.... Have they found any bozons yet, that's what I want to know

 

[Zenith.UK]

Windows United Arab Emirates version?!

Anyway.... Have they found any bozons yet, that's what I want to know

No, no Higgs boson found yet because they're running it at low power. They'll crank up the watts in the coming months to a higher operating power. It's currently 450GeV (giga-electron-volts, a measure of mass and speed) for each beam, making a head-on collision 900GeV (450*2). Once the power is in the TeV range (1000's of GeV) then effects due to Higgs boson decay might start showing up more frequently. The Higgs boson is a peculiar particle because it is neutral and has no spin making it difficult to directly detect. The experiments at the LHC will instead work on detecting a specific pattern of decay products.

And I meant I was using Windows Universal Amiga Emulator. Win.U.A.E.

 

[Ctuchik]

PHEAR TEH TIME TRAVELLING BIRDS!!!!


Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird? - TIME

 

[rynnor]

Does anyone actually think they'll manage to find a Higgs-Boson or Darkmatter?

I tend to think these are just mis-understandings rather than something real?

What happens if the LHC never finds any? Does the theory get binned or do we build an even bigger one?

 

[Ctuchik]

well as far as i have heard they already know that darkmatter exist.

now i think there just after to prove that it IS the must-have basic building block they claim it to be...


but to be perfectly honest, i rather they didnt use that thing. i know its a very very big "what if", but what if it actually DOES open up a black hole or something other such nasty shit?

they say the possibility is there, they just dont THINK that it will be big enough or stay long enough to cause any damage.


and tbh, whenever scientists "think" something i tend to get really nervous

 

[old.Tohtori]

Bah, this is no feat.

Freddyshouse has had the LHC running for ages and while results have been rather weak and quite disturbing, i think we can safely say that we were the first.

I mean come on, TdC and Jupitus have been colliding their hardons for who knows how long

 

[Rulke]

Does anyone actually think they'll manage to find a Higgs-Boson or Darkmatter?

I tend to think these are just mis-understandings rather than something real?

What happens if the LHC never finds any? Does the theory get binned or do we build an even bigger one?

Our current understanding of physics predicts the existence of the Higgs Boson as an extremely high energy but short lived particle. If the LHC doesn't detect it then that basically invalidates the whole theory and a new one will have to be found that fits better - that's the basis for all scientific progress.

If it IS found, it'll shed light on the matter-energy relationship which could lead to some amazing discoveries down the line

 

[TdC]

Bah, this is no feat.

Freddyshouse has had the LHC running for ages and while results have been rather weak and quite disturbing, i think we can safely say that we were the first.

I mean come on, TdC and Jupitus have been colliding their hardons for who knows how long

ah, but remember that Jups is much older than mine and therefore extremely difficult to detect, let alone prove the existence of

 

[rynnor]

well as far as i have heard they already know that darkmatter exist.

Nope - all they have is a theory based on the missing mass that they cannot detect - so they theorise 'dark matter' to fill the gap.

It could well be nonsense - perhaps we will find out.

 

[Ctuchik]

Nope - all they have is a theory based on the missing mass that they cannot detect - so they theorise 'dark matter' to fill the gap.

It could well be nonsense - perhaps we will find out.

so they know theres something missing or they just think there is something there?

 

[old.Tohtori]

ah, but remember that Jups is much older than mine and therefore extremely difficult to detect, let alone prove the existence of

Wouldn't that make Jup older too, or are your hardons living in a different time-reality due to the first hardon collision?

 

[rynnor]

so they know theres something missing or they just think there is something there?

They cannot explain the expansion of the Universe with the mass they can observe - thus someone came up with the theory of Darkmatter - stuff with mass that cant be seen