The LHC particle accelerator

Anyone know about this accelerator due to come on-line in November. It is in Switzerland and the accelerator is 27 Km long (that's 12 miles for our American friends). They hope to smash sub atomic particles together to create microsingularities (mini black holes). This is cool stuff.

The Large Hadron Collider in CERN? I thought that thing was already up and running

reply to post by aguila

Horse

Mouth

Enjoy,

Scamandrius

reply to post by Beachcoma
It was supposed to be October 07, but it has now been moved to May of 08? And I thought I had problems. Oh well. If time travel is possible, I think they will find out in this facility.

reply to post by Astyanax

Thank you for that page.

reply to post by aguila


I visited LHC in spring and got a look at the ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE detectors, which can still be visited by the general public for a few months. These things are very impressive, so if you're in the neighborhood, I recommend you drop by.

They had a delay in getting the accelerator running because of a design error in the cooling systems of the guiding magnets. If the superconductivity of the systems inside the magnet suddenly disappear with the magnetic field still running at full capacity, the sudden heat generated by the now non-zero resistance of the material has to be carried away as quickly as possible. They did a test-run of such an event (although with smaller energies) and the one of the magnets exploded, damaging a few others. Because you obviously don't want this to happen during the experiments, they're taking care to reinforce the magnets.

Well, creating mini-black holes isn't their main objective ... the whole purpose of this contraption is to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson. Anything else is gravy, really.