CERN to start up

K

Kalvaer

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Dont know if many of you have been following the drama that has been going on with the CERN project.

Just got an email with confirmation from my wife who is working with they guys on the ATLAS detector. The are getting ready to start the beam :D

10 September is the day they will do the first attempt at circulating
the beam!

The event will be webcast on http://webcast.cern.ch/

From the US-LHC blog: ( http://uslhc.us/blogs/ )

"The energy of the beam will be 450 GeV. It will be an exciting day for
sure, and should be followed in 1-2 months by the most exciting day,
when we get the first proton-proton collisions. This will be between two
beams of 450 GeV each. Then, the acceleration system will be
commissioned to bring the beam energies up to 5 TeV each.

This coming weekend, protons will be injected into one section of the
LHC as a test of transfering the beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron
(SPS) accelerator into the LHC."

You can keep up to date with the LHC start up here:
http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html
Click to expand...
 
Yeah she is as excited as a little kid on Christmas day. Atlas (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) though is huge. http://atlas-service-enews.web.cern.ch/atlas-service-enews/photos.html and the LHC is now the coldest place in the universe

Looking forward to finding out what they learn when collisions actually begin and what new discoveries the founder of our WWW will bring us in the next few months
 
The end of the world is nigh! :D

Would really be interested in the results - if they were in laymans terms :p :)
 
Shake&Bake said:
The end of the world is nigh! :D

Would really be interested in the results - if they were in laymans terms :p :)
Click to expand...
Well some guy is already trying to sue them to stop start up saying they will kill us all :rolleyes:

I dont think I will understand most of the results myself, but will try get it into laymans terms from the wife to be explained for us all here.

Some interesting facts though:

  • It has taken six and a half years to build the LHC, at a cost of ÂŁ4.75bn
  • The LHC has the highest energy ever obtained in a collider, and so will bring us closer to the Big Bang and to the early universe
  • ATLAS is as high as a five-storey building
  • CMS is the size of 40 large aeroplanes
  • The LHC will need to be both the coldest and the hottest place in the universe.
  • About 15 petabytes of data will be generated annually. If stored on CDs, this would create a 20km-high tower of discs.

That last one is just unbelievable.. could you imagine trying to download that on a telkom line
 
Kalvaer said:
Well some guy is already trying to sue them to stop start up saying they will kill us all :rolleyes:

I dont think I will understand most of the results myself, but will try get it into laymans terms from the wife to be explained for us all here.

Some interesting facts though:

  • It has taken six and a half years to build the LHC, at a cost of ÂŁ4.75bn
  • The LHC has the highest energy ever obtained in a collider, and so will bring us closer to the Big Bang and to the early universe
  • ATLAS is as high as a five-storey building
  • CMS is the size of 40 large aeroplanes
  • The LHC will need to be both the coldest and the hottest place in the universe.
  • About 15 petabytes of data will be generated annually. If stored on CDs, this would create a 20km-high tower of discs.

That last one is just unbelievable.. could you imagine trying to download that on a telkom line
Click to expand...

Yip - would imagine its the same kind of feeling I get when downloading a 700mb .avi on a 384k line :p :D :o
 
Shake&Bake said:
Yip - would imagine its the same kind of feeling I get when downloading a 700mb .avi on a 384k line :p :D :o
Click to expand...
Well lets think of this,

1 petabytes = 1 048 576 gigabytes

So thats 15728640 gigabytes of data a year or 1795.5 gigabyte you would have to download per hour :eek:

If it was local, and using a TI account it would cost R393 216 000.00 per year to pay for the bandwitdh

If we work on R70/gig of international.. thats R1 101 004 800.00

Its going to be cheaper to fly over each week and fly back with a case full of DVD's for scientists in SA to do any research of the data
 
Well take those figures and put the Zim$ instead of ZAR and then it becomes slightly acceptable :p
 
I'm sure I can try, You would need there software to analyse what it actually means and then understanding it is another problem. (This can however be downloaded)

Found this from a quote by Salvatore Mele, a project leader at CERN.

The problem, says Mele, is that HEP data is generally written in "an experiment-propriety non-standard format" that only those working on the experiment understand. Also, this knowledge resides only in scientists' heads, and is forgotten once an experiment is finished. So the answer lies in formulising the knowledge and embedding it in the saved data. But for the moment, no one knows how to do this. "It remains a challenge for the techies"
Click to expand...

We would all of course be able to view whats going on via the live webcams
 
This is actually damn exciting, busy reading "Alpha and Omega" by Charles Seife at the mo and its explaining all about quarks, guons, muons, neutrinos and the like. It mentions CERN too, dying to get some near-English explanation of the results.
 
Well the only information that I had come across concerning CERN before was in the Dan Brown novel, "Angels and Demons" :D
 
LHC synchronization test successful

Quoted from the blogs posted above:

The synchronization of the LHC's clockwise beam transfer system and the rest of CERN's accelerator chain was successfully achieved last weekend. Tests began on Friday 8 August when a single bunch of a few particles was taken down the transfer line from the SPS accelerator to the LHC.

After a period of optimization, one bunch was kicked up from the transfer line into the LHC beam pipe and steered about 3 kilometres around the LHC itself on the first attempt. On Saturday, the test was repeated several times to optimize the transfer before the operations group handed the machine back for hardware commissioning to resume on Sunday.
The anti-clockwise synchronization systems will be tested over the weekend of 22 August.
Click to expand...

lhc.png
 
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