Large Hadron Collider

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Large Hadron Collider Breaks Energy Record—By 300%
Ker Than, for National Geographic News, Published March 19, 2010

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) set a new energy record this morning, tripling its former peak performance. In doing so, the "big bang machine" took an important step toward full-power operation.

At 5:20 a.m., local time, in Geneva, Switzerland, physicists sent two proton beams racing around the Large Hadron Collider's oval-shaped, 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) underground tunnel.

Each beam packed a powerful 3.5-trillion-electron-volt (TeV) punch—the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator, or atom smasher.

The Large Hadron Collider had also set the previous record. Last December the LHC smashed two 1.18-TeV beams to create a 2.36-TeV collision.

The two 3.5-TeV beams will eventually be smashed together to create a whopping 7-TeV energy collision—half the collider's maximum energy level.

"We're all hoping [the collision] will happen in the next couple of weeks," said James Gillies, a spokesperson for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the machine.

"If things continue carrying on the way they've been, that's a pretty safe estimate."

Large Hadron Collider Not Fully Recovered

Once 7-TeV collisions begin, the plan is to have the Large Hadron Collider, which lies beneath the French-Swiss border, run continuously for 18 to 24 months before a scheduled shutdown that could last a year or more.

The long break is necessary to complete repairs from an LHC electrical malfunction in 2008, Gillies said. The hiatus will also allow engineers to prepare the collider for 14-TeV collisions—the atom smasher's maximum operating energy.

"We haven't fully recovered from the problems we had in September 2008," Gillies said. "There's still work to be done on the machine before we can move to higher energy. And there's routine maintenance—there always is with these machines."

LHC Going Back to Basics

But even at half power, there will be plenty of things to keep the LHC scientists busy, Gillies said.

Even at 7-TeV, experts say, the LHC could discover long-sought partners of known subatomic particles, evidence of new dimensions, or even the Higgs boson—aka the God particle—a theoretical particle that physicists think is responsible for mass in the universe.

CERN physicists will also be preoccupied with what Gillies calls "bread-and-butter physics."

This will include reconfirming the standard model of physics with the LHC by trying to create elementary particles that have already been seen in other machines—such as top quarks, the most massive of the elementary particles that have been observed so far.

Elementary particles are not made up of anything else and therefore are considered the building blocks of everything else, including the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom.

"That's a big deal for us, to find top quarks," Gillies said. "They're popping out of the Tevatron [particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois] all the time, but we haven't found them yet" with the LHC.

[Johnsmith Profile]

Magnetic monopole experiment at CERN could rewrite laws of physics
March 24, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- An experiment led by a University of Alberta researcher, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, could dramatically change our concepts of basic physics, revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and could eventually lead to technologies in future generations that right now only exist in science fiction.

U of A physics professor James Pinfold is leading an international team of physicists who will use ultra high energy proton collisions. The protons will move at very near the speed of light, in search for a hypothetical particle, called the magnetic monopole.

The magnetic monopole is a theoretical particle of matter. "Several important theories of physics are built on the belief that monopoles exist and it would be a great scientific coup to prove that," said Pinfold.

If successful, Pinfold says, physics textbooks from university level right down to high school will have to be revised.

"Our conventional understanding of magnets tells us they have a north pole and a south pole," said Pinfold. "A magnetic monopole has only one pole and that will change our understanding and the potential of electromagnetism," the force that binds particles of matter together. "Electromagnet force is the reason that, when I sit down on a chair, I don't fall through it."

Pinfold says the discovery of electronic monopoles will open up a whole new future for materials and technology if scientists can produce large numbers of them. "Monopoles could make materials strong enough to withstand a nuclear explosion and could also enable magnetic levitation."

Conventional understanding of magnets is that they must have north and south poles. In 1930 it was shown that a sub atomic particle with just a single magnetic pole could exist. Several modern theories of physics are built on the theoretical existence of magnetic monopoles.

Last year, researchers in France and Germany reported the observation of certain states of spin ice, a kind of crystalline material with essentially the same atomic arrangements as water ice that would create monopole-like particles. But Pinfold warns, "these 'quasi-monopoles' should not be confused with the real thing being sought by the U of A led collaboration at CERN."

The U of A-led experiment is already underway at the LHC and Pinfold says he hopes to find evidence of magnetic monopoles early in 2011. "It's quite an honour to be conducting this experiment," said Pinfold. "We can't wait till we get our hands on the data from the LHC."

At CERN, on the Swiss, French border, Pinfold's team will use the LHC, a particle accelerator 27 kilometres in circumference, to search for magnetic monopoles in the shrapnel like debris produced by colliding protons. The proton collisions will create unprecedented energy, 14 TeV. The tiny fireballs created in the impact will duplicate the energy produced just after the Big Bang, the event that created the universe.

Provided by University of Alberta

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ATLAS 7 TeV Collision Events recorded, March 30th, 2010
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1255405

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Einstein equations indicate possibility of black hole formation at the LHC
by Miranda Marquit, April 6, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the concerns that has been voiced about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is that it could result in the formation of black holes that could destroy the world. While most scientists dismiss claims that anything produced in the LHC would destroy the planet, there are some that think that black formation could be seen with LHC collisions of sufficiently high energy. This idea has gotten a further boost from recent efforts by Matthew Choptuik at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Frans Pretorius, at Princeton University in New Jersey.

What we did was a calculation,” Choptuik tells PhysOrg.com. “We solved some of the Einstein field equations describing head on soliton collisions at certain energies.” Choptuik and Pretorius present their work, and their conclusions, in Physical Review Letters: “Ultrarelativistic Particle Collisions.”

“Our calculation produced results that most were expecting, but no one had done the calculation before. People were just sort of assuming that it would work out,” Choptuik says. “Now that these simulations have been done, some scientists will have a better idea of what to look for in terms of trying to see if black holes are formed in LHC collisions.”

Choptuik points out that there has been an effort for more than 50 years to marry particle physics with the idea of gravity. “At the level of classical physics we think we understand gravity pretty well,” he explains. “However, at the quantum mechanical level, gravity is not at all well understood. Scientists have been looking for a way to understand quantum gravity in the same way as we understand how the smallest particles work on a quantum level. While solving these equations doesn’t answer all the questions, it does substantiate what we have already assumed.”

One of the keys to the principles behind these field calculations is string theory. String theory suggests that there are several dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions (plus time) that we see in classical physics. “If extra dimensions do exist, they could be as large as 10s to 100s of a micrometer. And if those extra dimensions are big enough, then there is a chance that the particle collisions at the LHC might be able to form black holes,” Choptuik says.

Of course, these black holes would be quite tiny, and difficult to detect. On top of that, they would evaporate almost instantly, making it even more difficult to detect whether they had even existed. “In collision like this, you would have to look at the debris,” Choptuik explains. “You’d look at the decay pattern in space. In a normal collision, you would get jets of debris. If a black hole was created and evaporated, the pattern would look more spherical than jet-like.”

However, the fact that the solution of these Einstein field equations suggests that black hole formation could be possible at the LHC is a far cry from actually detecting it. “Some are already taking this very seriously,” Choptuik says. “However, I don’t think that we are likely to actually see any black holes at the LHC, even if it is possible.”

[Sheeple Profile]

1st extinction event: Leaked CERN documents state LHC has 70% chances to produce ‘ice-9′ strangelets on 11/9/2010

Abstract. We have received and will show in this article astonishing documents leaked out of CERN internal servers, about the CASTOR project, a Centauro and STrangelet Object Research to hunt for strangelets ‘likely‘ to be produced at the LHC.
...

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1st extinction event: Leaked CERN documents state LHC has 70% chances to produce ‘ice-9′ strangelets on 11/9/2010

Abstract. We have received and will show in this article astonishing documents leaked out of CERN internal servers, about the CASTOR project, a Centauro and STrangelet Object Research to hunt for strangelets ‘likely‘ to be produced at the LHC.
...

I read about this the other day & I can't believe how scary shit this stuff is. I can't understand how it's being allowed to happen with so much at risk. This reminds me of a series of vids I watched last year by Michael Tsarlson ( I think that's how you spell it) where his theory was that the earth didn't naturally produce the ice - age, because there is no way that it could have & whatever happened, happened overnight not over a long period as we are taught, & that it would have taken excessive amount of fluid to come out of the blue to cause the distruction & result in the big freeze, he suggested that it was possibly from another planet being destroyed & their oceans fell to earth causing the Ice -age. Now I wonder whether history is repeating itself literally & wonder if there is the chance that we have been here before & did we destroy ourselves just as the old story goes about Atlantis

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Letter
Nature advance online publication 17 November 2010 | doi:10.1038/nature09610; Received 8 October 2010; Accepted 27 October 2010; Published online 17 November 2010

Trapped antihydrogen
G. B. Andresen, M. D. Ashkezari, M. Baquero-Ruiz, W. Bertsche, P. D. Bowe, E. Butler, C. L. Cesar, S. Chapman, M. Charlton, A. Deller, S. Eriksson, J. Fajans, T. Friesen, M. C. Fujiwara, D. R. Gill, A. Gutierrez, J. S. Hangst, W. N. Hardy, M. E. Hayden, A. J. Humphries, R. Hydomako, M. J. Jenkins, S. Jonsell, L. V. Jørgensen, L. Kurchaninov, N. Madsen, S. Menary, P. Nolan, K. Olchanski, A. Olin, A. Povilus, P. Pusa, F. Robicheaux, E. Sarid, S. Seif el Nasr, D. M. Silveira, C. So, J. W. Storey, R. I. Thompson, D. P. van der Werf, J. S. Wurtele & Y. Yamazaki

Abstract: Antimatter was first predicted1 in 1931, by Dirac. Work with high-energy antiparticles is now commonplace, and anti-electrons are used regularly in the medical technique of positron emission tomography scanning. Antihydrogen, the bound state of an antiproton and a positron, has been produced2, 3 at low energies at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) since 2002. Antihydrogen is of interest for use in a precision test of nature’s fundamental symmetries. The charge conjugation/parity/time reversal (CPT) theorem, a crucial part of the foundation of the standard model of elementary particles and interactions, demands that hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same spectrum. Given the current experimental precision of measurements on the hydrogen atom (about two parts in 1014 for the frequency of the 1s-to-2s transition4), subjecting antihydrogen to rigorous spectroscopic examination would constitute a compelling, model-independent test of CPT. Antihydrogen could also be used to study the gravitational behaviour of antimatter5. However, so far experiments have produced antihydrogen that is not confined, precluding detailed study of its structure. Here we demonstrate trapping of antihydrogen atoms. From the interaction of about 107 antiprotons and 7 × 108 positrons, we observed 38 annihilation events consistent with the controlled release of trapped antihydrogen from our magnetic trap; the measured background is 1.4 ± 1.4 events. This result opens the door to precision measurements on anti-atoms, which can soon be subjected to the same techniques as developed for hydrogen.