Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Nice thread!

Beams are made of “trains” of bunches, each containing around 100 billion protons. These bunch trains are circulating at almost the speed of light in opposite directions and cross one another at the centre of the experiments. The intensity of the beams, in other words the number of proton bunches, was gradually increased to achieve 2040 proton bunches per beam yesterday...

As a result, the experiments are raking in the data. The integrated luminosity has exceeded the milestone of one inverse femtobarn earlier this week – already a quarter of the integrated luminosity recorded throughout 2015...

This performance is even more remarkable given that the chain of accelerators that feed the LHC faced a technical issue last week. A fault in a main power supply of the Proton Synchrotron (PS) accelerator stopped the accelerator chain for several days. PS, commissioned in 1959, is the third link in the chain of four accelerators that propel the protons before they are injected into the LHC. Power was back to the PS last Thursday.

Source: CERN, Updates, June 2, 2016 - Data harvest in the LHC

So they had another power issue last week. This is the first time I heard about that. But they kept the trains rolling (hehe) for 35 hours until power could be restored to PS accelerator. Now they are swimming in data! The general notion here is that they have already reached 1/4 for what they reached last year in total. "Luminosity" is a general measurement of how effect the collisions are happening.

The science is happening now!

Updates

So they have been circulating beams around since coming back on-line (see previous post). CERN has also released reports about last year's experiments at their site--next batch will include work done this year, est. release date is August, 2016. If you think LHC is just some large experiment they dreamt up in the near past... time to rethink that notion.

The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), CERN’s second-largest accelerator, is celebrating its 40th birthday. But the 7-kilometre-circumference accelerator is not getting a break for the occasion: it will continue to supply the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and several fixed-target experiments with protons and heavy ions.

The SPS began life in a particularly spectacular fashion. On 17 June 1976, the machine, a giant among its contemporaries, accelerated protons to 300 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) for the first time.
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At present, for example, it supplies particles to the COMPASS, NA61/Shine, NA62 and NA63 experiments, and it will shortly start sending protons to the new AWAKE project

CERN, Updates, June 17, 2016 - Happy Birthday SPS!

SPS, the site says, was converted to a proton-antiproton collider which is where they found the new W and Z bosons (same source). Which is a perfect setup for the next update from CERN.

AWAKE (the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment) will be the first accelerator of its kind in the world. It is currently under construction, but hopes to test the concept that plasma wakefields driven by a proton beam could accelerate charged particles.
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AWAKE hopes to start collecting physics data by the end of the year. Next the team will finalise installation of the experiment, the laser and the full plasma cell.

CERN, Updates, June 17, 2016 - First beam enters unique AWAKE experiment

Plasma is just ionized gas. You've seen them before in compact fluorescent light bulbs, neon signs, and that novelty globe where the "lightening" follows your fingers when you touch it. They are also created to heat hydrogen isotopes to the point of nuclear fusion. Now CERN is going to put them to the test and try and accelerate particles! The particles will ride the wake in front of the plasma just like a surfer rides a wave (source below, nearly the same terminology)! The current acceleration methods have an upper limit where the beam can interfere with the beam pushing it and heat up towards those of fusion temps. Since the accelerators are built to speed up beams and not create a fusion reaction this would cause damage to the machine. Stanford Univ. says the theoretical upper speeds are "10s of billions eV per meter" SLAC Portal - Plasma Wakefield Acceleration.

Happy birthday SPS and let us hope that your new little brother AWAKE has just as much success!

I found this link after seeing yet another "strange could formation" over CERN (or Geneva, or LHC, take you pick) because they are opening 'portals' (again)

Link: Hasthelrgehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworlyet.com

Afraid to click the link? Here I a story about the creator of the site: ZDNet - Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?. (PS - The link returns a glib: Nope.)

Turns out he's a 20-something with a sense of humor and 10$ a month to spare to allay all your fears! Hey, it is on the internet so it must be true! Right?

Now appearing for one day only!

Make your own Higgs Boson pizza!

Well the fine folks over there at CERN (source of the link) have a sense of humor (like on April Fools Day they ran a story about discovering The Force! Yep, that one. The one that binds us together from Star Wars). So they threw a couple recopies on their website on how to make a pizza crust and then either veggie or meat topping options. Once you cook the dough for a bit you pull it out and top it using one of their particle trace diagrams of a Higgs Boson with your toppings of choice! You finish the pizza and enjoy a slice of Higgs Boson pizza! Not exactly cutting edge science but it is a fun way to introduce physics in a non-threatening manner ("do your homework!" vs. pizza).

No weasels were hurt in the making of the Higgs Boson pizzas!

A new furnace arrived at CERN’s Large Magnet Facility last month and is currently being installed and tested.
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Nb3Sn has been chosen for the next generation of superconducting magnets. The field achieved with this material can reach up to 16T. The production of such coils is complex as we must first wind the coils and then perform the heat treatment that allows the tin and niobium to react and turn into the superconducting Nb3Sn compound.” explains Friedrich Lackner, a project engineer who supervises the coil production for HL-LHC.
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The new 32-metre-long furnace, called GL010000, will allow the heat treatment of coils with a length up to 11m and can reach temperatures up to 900°C providing a sufficient margin for future challenges.

CERN, July 18, 2016 - New furnace a step towards future collider development.

One step closer to opening those portals so demons from the 6th plane of Hell can come streaming into our dimension! And what a cool name "GL01 10K". The making of superconducting magnets usually creates a brittle ceramic material (cuprate) and this one is metallic but still as brittle. So they wind the material before baking it so it does not crumble. The article states they currently use 8.3T coils which is way below an MRI (i.e., not strong enough to open a portal!).

I think eventually they will use REBCO which can generate a 30T field strength superconductor magnetic field. The size also decreases with REBCO so it is kind of a wonder why they just don't do the full upgrade. Still cool news from LHC and CERN!

With a larger data set now analysed, more precise measurements of the Standard Model processes and more sensitive searches for the direct production of new particles at the highest energy are possible. As an example, the 125 GeV Higgs boson, discovered in 2012, has now also been observed at the new energy of 13 TeV with higher statistical significance. In addition, both ATLAS and CMS experiments have made new precise measurements of Standard Model processes, especially looking for anomalous particle interactions at high mass, a very sensitive but indirect test for physics beyond the Standard Model.
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ATLAS and CMS have also looked for any signs of the direct production of new particles predicted by Supersymmetry and other exotic theories of physics beyond the Standard Model, but no compelling evidence of new physics has appeared yet. In particular, the intriguing hint of a possible resonance at 750 GeV decaying into photon pairs, which caused considerable interest from the 2015 data, has not reappeared in the much larger 2016 data set and thus appears to be a statistical fluctuation.

CERN, Press Releases, Aug. 5, 2016 - Chicago sees floods of LHC data and new results at the ICHEP 2016 conference.

Some of this was hinted at and/or reported all last week. What everybody needs to understand is that the amount of data being generated has increased "5 times" over 2015 (same source). So the new data is scanned for those points of interest and they did not find anything. Conspiracy? No, the machine was operating at the edge of its ability so who knows what was recorded. After the increase, the weasel incident, and restart, they had more power for more precise measurements (that is the quip about the Higgs-boson at "higher [statistical] significance").

The measurement 750 GeV was a resonance (like a harmonic on a string) that was interesting but not found. If a real particle was there they would have found it... and other anomalies. Like last year, and because there is more data, it will be continued to be poured over for any unexpected findings. The Standard Model seems safe... for now.

The Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) performance continued to surpass expectations, when this week it achieved 2220 proton bunches in each of its counter-rotating beams – the most it will achieve this year.

This is not the maximum the machine is capable of holding (at full intensity the beam will have nearly 2800 bunches) but it is currently limited by a technical issue in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).
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The SPS is currently experiencing a small fault that could be exacerbated by high beam intensity – hence the number of proton bunches sent to the LHC per injection is limited to 96, compared to the normal 288.

CERN Updates, Aug. 19, 2016 - LHC pushes limits of performance.

So they have peaked for the year. No more, larger punches into other dimensions!


They have two more months of runs to go but they have reached the upper limit of the number of particles circulating at once. After this year's run is complete they will go in and fix the SPS. So next year is the year of doom (I hope we find Hellboy!).

I think it is pretty cool that they get the beams up and spinning then just leave them circulating by themselves for up to 20 hours (as noted in the update).

Today, CERN Director General, Fabiola Gianotti, and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) of the Government of India, Sekhar Basu signed an Agreement admitting India to CERN as an Associate Member. The Government of India still needs to notify CERN of its final approval for the Agreement to enter into force.

CERN, Updates, Nov. 22, 2016 - India to become Associate Member State of CERN.

With a statue of Dancing Shiva out front... well, it is about time! India is progressing in their renewable energy and started a fusion project. They are also considering a fast neutron reactor so joining CERN just makes sense. What they really need is some stern over sight in government and education as there have been incidents of institutional corruption and widespread cheating on exams (medical ones at that).

And there is a story about LHCf being hooked up inline to study comic rays over at the CERN site.

News from one of the experiments at CERN.

With its single proton and single electron, hydrogen is the most abundant, simple and well-understood atom in the Universe. Its spectrum has been measured to very high precision. Antihydrogen atoms, on the other hand are poorly understood. Because the universe appears to consist entirely of matter, the constituents of antihydrogen atoms – antiprotons and positrons – have to be produced and assembled into atoms before the antihydrogen spectrum can be measured. It's a painstaking process, but well worth the effort since any measurable difference between the spectra of hydrogen and antihydrogen would break basic principles of physics and possibly help understand the puzzle of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe.

Today's ALPHA result is the first observation of a spectral line in an antihydrogen atom, allowing the light spectrum of matter and antimatter to be compared for the first time. Within experimental limits, the result shows no difference compared to the equivalent spectral line in hydrogen. This is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that best describes particles and the forces at work between them, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen should have identical spectroscopic characteristics.
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ALPHA is a unique experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator facility, able to produce antihydrogen atoms and hold them in a specially-designed magnetic trap, manipulating antiatoms a few at a time. Trapping antihydrogen atoms allows them to be studied using lasers or other radiation sources.
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Antihydrogen is made by mixing plasmas of about 90,000 antiprotons from the Antiproton Decelerator with positrons, resulting in the production of about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms per attempt. Antihydrogen atoms can be trapped if they are moving slowly enough when they are created. Using a new technique in which the collaboration stacks anti-atoms resulting from two successive mixing cycles, it is possible to trap on average 14 anti-atoms per trial…

Phys.org, Dec. 19, 2016 - ALPHA observes light spectrum of antimatter for first time.

So the Standard Model still stands! Pretty cool science here building an antihydrogen molecule then measuring it. Sounds like PITA to get a few molecules to measure. So the LHC's data spike amounted to nothing new and spectacular (standard model still stands). Now this news.

I wonder what they will find at higher energy levels?

Update: We have come full circle with this story! Here is an update and even more to add.

Last April, a ...stone marten jumped a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland and was promptly electrocuted. Now, that same poor creature's corpse is going on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum in an exhibition titled Dead Animal Tales...

The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week....

Originally posted, TheGuardian.com - here.
Source of story above, boingboing.net, 1/31/17 - Weasel electrocuted at CERN to go on museum display (with photo of weasel to be displayed)

The article quotes theguardian article so I will post both links!

First off, it was a "stone marten" (Fr. - fouine) that grounded out the 66 kV line. Apparently it became known simply as "The CERN Weasel." The staff cleaned up (probably) what was left and checked for damage. The CERN Weasel, as Phage said earlier, is "extinct," and they already disposed of the carcass.

Wait?! How then did they get a body, you ask? In November, in a less publicized affair, another fouine managed to electrocute itself at the LHC facility. But this time it did not shut the entire facility down. ZAP! Instant substitute!

Seems kind of... grizzly to display animals that did not survive their run in with human tech!

And let that be a lesson to you all. Do NOT swallow a live catfish while drunk!!!