Hey guys, thought you'd be interested...

and also



hehe...like I pay attention to that, the fact that about 20 different people have already said as much on facebook/twitter/etc....

Awesome!

(Are we dead yet?!)

It's just 450 GeV each beam at the moment, so less powerful than what is going on at the Tevatron (Fermilab), so we're safe.

If nothing goes wrong, expect 1-2 TeV beams in the next week, which will be twice as powerful as the Tevatron and when the world should start worrying.....about whether to shoot the idiots that said the world was going to end.

Oh...I'm currently posting this on the WiFi at Geneva airport, my plane is now boarding.....guess I should get on....

Ahhhh thanks so much for posting this here!

Cool.

How many TeV's is it at the max, assuming they ever get there?

11 and a bit I read.

IIRC.

TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN POLEY!

Anyone care to explain in simple terms that I'd understand?

It was designed so that each beam could run at 7 TeV, we won't hit that until there is a shut down to add some more safety measures and some more "re-training" of the magnets.

After the whole mess last year they want to make sure if something like it happens again it doesn't damage the machine like before.

The re-training of the magnets basically means testing them with the required current flowing to reach the desired energy, there are ways to make the magnets perform better but I've never really looked up how they do it. The magnets were all trained for 7TeV running last year, problem is that this training is done on the surface, they have since found that moving the magnets below ground upsets them and most of the magnets need re-doing.

They are aiming for 5 TeV in each beam sometime in the early new year, my guess would be near the end of January.

Which bits?

I'm glad to see that you have the same effects department as the one used for "The Lawnmower Man".

The only post I understood, but made the thread worth reading for a good belly laugh. Someone should post a screengrab.

Awesome!

I'd prefer all bits explained as if I was an idiot. Which I am. Particularly, I'd like it explained to me what we're hoping to gain from this experiment.

There, that's what I wanted to say!

They think that if they smash things together really fast they can understand the origins of the universe.

[lie]And make free healthcare for everyone. [/lie]

I haven't got an idea what the lines means. But it's pretty awesome that the thing is finally running. I was pretty disappointed when I found out the cooling liquid leaked and I had to wait before it was turned on. Could you please do me a favor and postpone the 7 TeV beam to 12 december 2012? Just for fun. I would like to see the whole world go crazy over nothing.

Righty I'll try and explain a few interesting bits (just put some music on for this...)

Before I start I'll do a little physics/chemisty lesson for some of you.

Hopefully you have all heard of Electrons, Protons and Neutrons, look around you, they are what makes up all the stuff you come into contact with on a daily basis and what a vast majority of the Universe is made from.

However it was discovered that Protons and Neutrons are made up of other much smaller particles, they are called Quarks and the matter around us at the moment is made up of combination's of Up (u) and Down (d) quarks. We have yet to see the electron split into anything smaller and believe it to solid and not made up of anything smaller.

I've just listed 3 out of the 4 of what we call the first generation of sub-atomic particles, there is one other, called the electron-neutrino, there are millions upon millions of these extremely small and almost (but not quite) massless particles flying around you at the moment, they don't do much apart from some rather interesting "mixing" with other types of neutrino's, which I won't go into.

So Quarks = u and d
and Leptons = electrons and electron-neutrino

Which leads me to the other generations of particles.

You all know or have heard about Einstein's theory of relativity I hope and that energy can be converted in matter as a function of the speed of light squared, E = mc^2.

Well, we use something very similar E^2 = (p^2*c^2)+(m^2*c^4), don't worry about the details unless you want to go read about it here, it's just another form of the equation that we use.

Using the LHC we are going smash particles together with a very high energy, allowing the possibility to create new higher mass particles that haven't existed in our universe since it's inception. These particles don't linger around like the matter we see today, they are unstable particles that after, what is normally a very short time, decay into less energetic but more stable particles.

These energetic particles are what we are looking for and fill up the 2nd and 3rd generations of Quarks and Leptons, there are only 3 generations according to our best theories, which we already know and are called, Charm (c), Strange (s), Top (t) and Bottom (b) Quarks and the Muon, Muon-Neutrino, Tau and Tau-Neutrino leptons.

So, I've just explained a bunch of physics that didn't really answer the question of what we are going to do with it.

From a purely physics point of view creating these particles, seeing how they interact and behave will help us know if our current theories are correct. We also hope to discover newer more massive particles that a higher energy beam allows us to create, particles such as the Higg's Boson which is theorised to couple matter to the Higg's Field and give matter its mass. We will also look into String Theory, SuperSymmetry, Grand-Unified Theories, Charge-Parity Violation and all sorts of other theories out there.

That's a small physics argument which we use to say what is a good experiment from a physics point of view, now for some things a little more down to earth.

Our knowledge of the electron and the atom didn't just pop out from theories, it was tested, modeled and understood via experimentation. All of the electronic devices you use today are the result of our understanding of the electron and how to manipulate matter down to the atomic level. All of this came from particle experiments done many years ago, some before the WWII.

Not only electronics has particle physics to thank, but medical treatments for cancer (proton-therapy), MRI's for scanning the brain, all come from physics experiments done many many years ago. The internet? that was made to help physicists exchange data easily, lots of technologies come about from experiments with no actual connection to the experiment itself.

A lot of discoveries made even before the majority of us were even born are only now beginning to be realised and put into practice.

So what's my point? My point is that the experiments we are doing now, learning about Quarks and other sub-atomic particles will no doubt be used in the future in technologies that after a while will become common place. It takes generations for the knowledge gained in these experiments to be properly understood and converted into useful purposes, some never makes it or has no use, but a lot of it does.

Not many experiments are ever run with the intention of producing a commercial product(s) at the end of it, they are run because we want to ask questions of our surroundings and understand how the many parts of the puzzle fit together. If we had to justify every experiment and say what future commercial gains they would bring, hardly anything would be done because at the beginning we really can't tell and no big company is going to spend money on what-if's.

Now this is wwwaaaaaay out there.

Let me pose one interesting thought, say we do find the Higg's Boson, the reason that matter has mass and from where gravity starts to come in, is it not feasible to think that sometime in the future we might figure out a way to easily de-couple matter from the Higg's field easily, just think of the possibilities that would bring.

People have for years been trying to build anti-gravity devices using what you may think of as a brute-force method and with no understanding of why matter is even attracted to each other. Sure we can model it and see it happening and account for it when sending people and satellites into space through Einstien's theories on relativity and Space-Time, but again they don't tell you why it happens, just what it results in.

that last bit is the only question i had, and there you answered it! MOAR ON THE HIGGS FIELD/BOSON PLS

Poley wrote a great post about the Higgs, and the fundamental social justification for the LHC, but I'd like to expand on that and talk about SUSY.

The LHC isn't just searching for the Higgs though, and we'll be in an interesting dilemma if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else.

As poley explained very well (and I like the Kurzweil-style futurism at the end, that is very interesting), ordinary matter (collectively called fermions) and the particles that carry forces (collectively called bosons) have this unusual property mass, and before 1964 there was no way for theorists to predict the mass of these particles. Peter Higgs (and also Englert and Brout) came up with an elegant theory of a new quantum field, and masses of particles are determined by their interactions with this field (quantised in Higgs bosons).

The obvious question is, what is the mass of this Higgs boson? We've done various experiments and not found it, so we can rule out certain masses it cannot be, and experimentalists have a window of between 115 GeV and 180 GeV where they think the Higgs boson should be. Theorists, however, predict it to be much bigger, about 15 orders of magnitude bigger.

To the rescue comes supersymmetry (SUSY), which predicts that all particles have much heavier versions of themselves (all given appropriately hilarious names, so all the leptons have sleptons and quarks have squarks. My favourite is the top quark, which just has the stop quark. Also the W boson has the Wino. hee).
In the early Universe, our normal particles existed indistinguishably from their SUSY partners and as the Universe cooled this supersymmetry broke down.

SUSY answers this problem of the mass of the Higgs, as the supersymmetric contributions cancel out the interactions with normal matter and explains why the theorists get such a high mass compared to the experimentalists. SUSY also unifies the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces to a remarkable degree.

There's a variety of different models of SUSY, but the one that matches best with our experimental predictions for the mass of the Higgs is well within the realm testable by the LHC. In fact, there may well be some neutralinos in that collision event in the OP, they should exist somewhere in the low TeV range (but they don't often interact with matter).

If the LHC discovers the Higgs and SUSY, then we have verification of our models of mass and an explanation of this discrepancy between our theory of the Higgs field and experimental predictions for the Higgs boson mass.

If the LHC discovers the Higgs without SUSY, we may well have some understanding of the Higgs field but certainly not a complete or satisfying one.

If the LHC discovers neither the Higgs nor SUSY, it means everything we know is wrong. This is a nightmare for justifying funding and all that, but it's incredibly exciting for the theorists and would require a radical new model of how particle physics works.

SUSY is also intwined with string theory, as a lot of modern string theory begins with SUSY and develops on from it. If SUSY is observed, it vaguely indicates that string theorists might possibly be heading in sort of the right direction (but it's certainly not a clear proof of string theory by a long way).

The unifing of the EM, Strong and Weak forces for me is actually one of my favourite parts, if I'm at all honest I'm not a big fan of the Higgs, everybody and their mum seems to talk about it and are doing it for their PhD.

I've found though when discussing the LHC and why, it's one of the discoveries that everyday folks can sort of get their head around and has more of a wow attached to it. True it's important, but getting a working GUT (grand unified theory) worked out from LHC data for me would have the same significance, even more so in some regards and should be something championed more often, problem is getting people to understand just how cool it is.

Other bits were nice too Mort, good little read, far better at explaining the good theoretical data we can get out of the LHC than me

and yeah, the whole de-coupling from the Higgs field...teehehe...my mind wanders...

oh and wino's...sbottom's ... :O I can't help but giggle slightly in every god damn SUSY lecture I've been, physicists need to be shot for some of the names they come up with.

Mort, on the Higgs front, there was a recent (as in last week) paper released by CDF+D0 regarding the lower limit of the Higgs, turns out it was just a 2 sigma statisical fluctuation (i think) on some of the lower bound limits they have now opened up again, I'd kinda skimmed the paper but think the lower limit is now bound by LEP data.

One other things folks, another important experiment started over the weekend, T2K, it's a neutrino experiment based in Japan, should hopefully answer some questions regarding those little oscillating buggers of particles and maybe even some measurements on Charge-Parity violation (why we have matter and not anti-matter or even just nothing in our universe)

My simplified explanation of Mort and Poley: 42.

In all seriousness, I read them both, and understood abou 65% of it.

Here's a cool 3D animation showing a breakdown of that collision event

http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/public/EVTDISPLAY/atlas2009-run140541-evt171897-fullmovie.swf

I really wish that I had paid at least a little attention in physics so that I could comprehend more than 10% of the above posts without having to research everything on Google for several hours first.

Thanks for posting this Andrew, and thank you both for the mini-physics lecture. You've helped rekindle my love for the subject a bit, after the battering it took through actually getting a physics degree!



I think this is absolutely key. Whatever the boffins of the world are actually working on, getting the public behind you is so important for government/other financial support. Taking an aspect that can be (more or less) explained to the layman and running with it is a really good trick for doing that.

it always gives me an egotistical-boner when i understand everything poley says.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Damn... you... power... supply!

Awesome! Suck on this Fermilab!

If you were to say decouple a ball from the higgs field, presumably in the name of antigravilulz, wouldn't this have an adverse affect on the physical structure of the ball itself? Or on small objects is the gravitational force insignificant enough to prevent this being a problem? Antigravity becomes less appealing if it causes the floatywoaty to disintegrate.

gravity has very little effect on everyday things around us, the matter around us is held together by electromagnetism and at the atomic level by the strong force.

gravity isn't even factored into the calculations we do at the LHC, the Higgs is our way of adding it into the standard model, but the fact that we have got this far without it shows how little an effect it has.