Items tagged with LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a modern engineering marvel of great importance to the scientific community. The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and it has been beset with obstacles over the course of is construction and during its operational history. Back in 2009, the LHC was damaged when a passing bird dive bombed a piece of bread onto a substation that was used to power the particle collider’s cryogenic systems. Fast forward to this week and yet another animal has knocked the LHC offline, but this time it was a ground assault instead of an attack from above. Amazingly, a weasel managed to chew on a 66-kilovolt electrical transformer cable and needless to say, the...
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Following a shutdown of over two years for upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider — no doubt one of the largest pieces of hot hardware in the world — was brought back online yesterday at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC, which made good on its promise of delivering the Higgs boson in 2012, is now at last poised to begin making scientific history once again. “Congratulations,” CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer said to thousands of staff members from the control room of the Large Hadron Collider. “Now the hard work starts.” The news of the LHC's firing back to life was especially gratifying, as early last week it looked as though the resumption of proton-smashing by the LHC would be delayed...
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You've already heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest, baddest, and highest-energy particle accelerator anywhere on the planet. The LHC sits in a circular tunnel 27km in circumference buried around 50m to 175m beneath the earth. It's purpose isn't to destroy the world, like so many doomsayers thought it would when physicists flipped the power switch, but to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions to recreate the conditions just after the theorized Big Bang. By doing so, physicists hope to gain a better understanding of all sorts of geeky topics, like quantum mechanics, general relativity, the structure of space and time, and other things that would make your...
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As death threats preceded the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last year, one might not be surprised at foul play as testing is performed prior to the restart of the LHC. But fowl play? The LHC has been out of action for over a year, due to a helium leak that caused it to be shut down on September 19th of last year, nine days after its start-up. With the LHC repaired, scientists have been running tests in anticipation of a restart later this month. However, the testing process was halted on Monday after the power to the LHC failed. A CERN spokeswoman, Christine Sutton, said scientists discovered fowl play:"The problem related to the high voltage supply. We get mains voltage from the...
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The Large Hadron Collider, damaged by a liquid helium leak relatively soon after being started for the first time, had already had its restart date pushed back from a few months, to spring, to June, to late summer. Now it is being pushed back to the end of September - over a year after the world's largest particle accelerator was knocked offline. According to the press release, collisions could follow the restart in late October. The LHC would shut down shortly over Christmas, and then run through to autumn 2010. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said: "The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data. It is cautious, ensuring that all the...
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been collecting lots of headlines this week as it finally ramped up to full speed. It has garnered attention for the massively sized experiments it will undertake (simulating conditions of the Big Bang), the questions its experiments will seek to answer (find the "God" particle), the cost of the project ($7.9 Billion), and even the fear that the LHC itself could create a black hole that would swallow up the Earth (it didn't... at least not yet). So it's understandable that a project of this magnitude would receive lots of attention--especially one of the more public of the experiments, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment, which is "one of the four 'eyes'...
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So you got up today, sat down to your bowl of Cheerios and Bananas, flipped on the Flinstones for a few minutes and then you really busted a move. You actually brought the bowl over to the sink, before you brushed your teeth and headed off to the office to strap on that desk for another solid 8.125 hours of turning the crank for the commonwealth of wherever you live. Let's face it, most of us lead a pretty sorry existence, at least by comparison, versus some of the really smart folks out there. Folks like the Steve Myers and the boys and girls down at the LHC in Geneva Switzerland crank it up a notch or two when they go to work. Rocket...
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