'micro Big Bang' en octubre o más tarde - Nos han timado con la cuenta atrás esa

These threads usually leave me scratching my head. At first I'm annoyed that people don't research a little before posting about the LHC, and then I'm even more annoyed at the snarky responses or technobabble from people in a position to help educate everyone and answer questions.

I'm working on one of the experiments on the LHC. I have been for nearly 3 years now. I know several people who have been working since the initial design stages back in the late eighties/early nineties. For us, this is an incredible time. We all finally get to see if our hard work has paid off, and over the next few years we will have an insight into the workings of our universe like never before.

The first things I'd like to point out are as follows. The 'LHC' isn't quite as pretty as everyone beleives. The enormous and beautiful machines people often post are the experiments, of which there are 4. This is the LHC itself:

Pretty boring. It is a 27km pair of tubes, containing nothing but vacuum, surrounded by supercooled superconducting magnets. When it is running, there will be 20,000,000 bunches of protons travelling in opposite directions around the tubes, or 'beampipes'. These bunches will each consist of _25,000 protons, and are born here:

(Yes, that is me, in an XKCD shirt). This is the Linac2, and it is the birthplace of protons for the LHC. They travel from here through a network of smaller accellerators at the CERN site:

After their long trip, many thousands of times around these acellerators, they are at 99.99999% the speed of light. It is then that we collide the beams of protons together in 4 locations around the LHC, in the same way that crossovers on a scalextrix racetrack allow you to collide racecars. At these 4 sites, the experiments that everyone mistakenly thinks of as the LHC exist. These are:

ALICE, A Large Ion Collider Experiment

ATLAS, A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS

CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid

LHCb, the Large Hadron Collider beauty Experiment

The last one is 'my' experiment. When I say mine, myself and about 700 other people from 48 institutes and labs all over the world collaborate to get her working, and to analyse the data from her. The two big experiments, CMS and ATLAS have a few thousand particle physicists working on them. The physics community is very good at ignoring political and racial borders, and on a few experiments we have israeli and palestinian researchers working side by side. We're more interested in understanding the universe than we are understanding human nature.

The difference between the collider and detectors is an important one, as essentially CERN designs and builds the collider, we design and build the experiments in our collaborations.

As it stands, we expect to get 'first beam' (someone will throw a few protons down the beampipe in one direction)sometime in the next couple of months, and 'first collisions' (we'll actually pull a spengler and cross the beams) in october/november. These will be at very low energies and only a few collisions at a time in order to test that everything i working ok, prior to ramping to full 'Luminosity' (Luminosity is what we call the intensity of the beam in terms of number of proton-proton collisions) sometime next year.

Even once we have done all of this, don't expect discovery of the higgs or any 'new physics' from the LHC for at least another year- the first year will be spent calibrating our detectors, making sure we understand the data they produce, and ironing out flaws. After that, we'll be able to start doing the analysis, and hopefully answer a few pretty fundamnetal questions:

1) Why do the different particles observed in nature have mass, and why do their masses vary? This we beleive to be as a result of the elusive Higgs boson (particle). This is the LHC's main raison d'etre, its reason to be. If we find the Higgs, it means that many theorists will breathe a sigh of relief, and many experimentalists will end up redundant, as it sort of wraps up a lot of our work.
If we don't find it, it is perhaps more interesting than if we do- the model of paerticle physics as we see it almost by definition requires the Higgs to make sense. If we don't see it, it means exciting times ahead for experimentalists and theorists alike.... Both CMS and ALTLAS are looking for the higgs.

2) Why is the universe made of matter? This may seem like an odd question, but bear with me. The Big Bang as we understand it made equal amounts of matter and antimatter. It is the only way to balance the cosmic checkbook. Why, then, are only 1 in 10 billion particles in our universe antimatter? We can make it in the lab, and we know that when we do make it, we must conserve some physical laws that mean we must also bring into existence matter in equal amounts. My experiment intends to answer this, the LHCb.

3) What did the universe look like a few femtoseconds after the big bang? ALICE will be smashing nature's elementary hambeasts together to answer this. In ALICE lead ions will collide at nearly the speed of light, unleashing so much energy in such a small space that temperatures and conditions close to the big bang will be brought about. This is where the blackholes come in. At these energies, temperatures, and pressures it may be possible to spontaneously create supermicro black holes. Will they absorb the earth? No. They will live for no more than femtoseconds, and the only way we'll be able to detect them is by the minute effects they will have on the surrounding particles they either decay into, or disrupt minutely in their path.

I hope this clears things up for you all, remember that it will be quite some time before the LHC 'switches on', and although it will mean I'll be partying later with my physics buddies, it isn't really going to be a very exciting affair for most people. We will be pretty busy holding our breath and hoping that we've got everything right. Not because we're concerned about catastrophies on a global scale, but on a much smaller one: Thousands of scientists around the world have spent years trying to get this going. If the beams aren't precisely aligned, or if we've gotten even some tiny aspect of the experiments/collider wrong, we could lose all that work from the damage a high energy proton beam can inflict on nearby material. It'll be harmless to everyone, as we'll be 160m above where the beams collide, but it could be devastating to our sensitive experiments.

Somnolent49 posted:
\/\/\/\/ Business Major. Science has the most unpredictable and unreliable ROI's on an individual, experiment by experiment basis, but on average it's also one of the best. The main benefit will be to give ourselves a more accurate idea of the fundamental laws of the universe, which will help engineers design better equipment. If you had asked somebody in the 1930's what the monetary gains from studying quantum physics would be, they'd be hard pressed to tell you, but thanks to that research we now have lasers, microprocessors, and a whole host of other technologies.

That is true. CERN hasn't ever really brought us an advancement in technology from the results it gets, but it has brought us huge overall advances in technology because we need these advances ourselves to perform the experiments. A couple of examples:

The World Wide Web. I shit you not. Al Gore reckons the internet is his, well he's in for a surprise
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/About/Web-en.html

In addition, the superconducting technologies we are using in our accelerator magnets are already under test as high efficiency power line cables.

DerDestroyer posted:
Though I find it very interesting to discover why there's an unbalanced equation between matter and anti-matter in the universe. As a business major I have to ask a question that's probably been asked already, what are the practical benefits of experimentation conducted on the LHC?

I find it difficult to believe over 10 billion dollars worth of cash is going to be pissed away for the sake of finding another particle or to satisfy the curiosity of a bunch of scientists. So what are some of the benefits that we can apply to our technology from these experiments?

Like what if we do discover the Higgs-Boson particle? What can we do with it? There has to be a way the investors can profit from this. Unless it's a government project funded by taxpayer dollars.

This is something that is often asked, and I can honestly say with a fair amount of shame that you are to a certain extent correct. It is however a slightly short-sighted view.

Why should the government blow vast amounts of money on something that doesn't have instant economic, societal or technological benefit?

There are reasons, and good ones. In the past scientific research of this kind has brought us the PET scan I mentioned earlier, the microwave oven, which is actually a form of particle accellerator, Nuclear energy, but more important than that...

It has trained entire generations of young scientists.

These are the guys that work for their PhD at CERN, go out into the world and work for research companies in almost every sector. The big guys, such as biomed, defense, robotics, computing.

For those who stick to it at CERN, you get the educators. The people whol lecture to packed classrooms, the ones who write textbooks.

Economoically speaking it is a very sound investment and one I am saddened to see the US cutting back on. There is an experiment at SLAC called BaBar that is doing research similar to my own, and they axed it with little warning. The future work of the ILC can be added to that too.

The other good thing about this sort of long-term investment, longer-term return type of research is that it doesn't actually cost that much, overall. CERN is a community and it works in a very democratic way. If you give a lot, you get a lot. The money the US invests in it went right back into their pockets as all the contracts to design and build components are shared out amongst the contributing countries based on their contribution. US engineers, steelworkers, electricians, all got paid by US money to make US built parts. It is likely it did as much for your economy as the cheques that were recently given out to boost it.

Goonsicle posted:
From what I understand if a microscopic black hole is created it will settle to the center of the Earth where it will continue to suck in matter a particle at a time for about a decade until we are all dead

So it maybe that we wont know for some time. Have a good night.

Sorry, but no.

If we do create a microscopic black hole, it will survive for a very, very limited time. The rate of absorbtion of material depends upon the amount of material around it, which in the vacuum of the beampipe is zero. It has nothing to feed on for the few femtoseconds it is in existence. We will have a hard time even detecting its presence, let alone making them, and we hope to make enough of them to take measurements.

Please, I know it sounds big and scary and cool, and awesome to speculate on it, but if people ask you if a black hole created at the LHC is going to kill us all, the simple answer, and the one I politely ask you all to give is an emphatic 'No'.