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CERN announced that on March 30 they will attempt to circulate beams in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV, the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. A live webcast will be shown of the event, and will include live footage from the control rooms for the LHC accelerator and all four LHC experiment, as well as a press conference after the first collisions are announced.
“With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics program,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
The webcast will be available at a link to be announced, but the tentative schedule of events (subject to change) and more information can be found at this link.
Webcasts will also be available from the control rooms of the four LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. The webcasts will be primarily in English.
Between now and 30 March, the LHC team will be working with 3.5 TeV beams to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the particle detectors from stray particles. All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions can begin.
“The LHC is not a turnkey machine,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.“The machine is working well, but we’re still very much in a commissioning phase and we have to recognize that the first attempt to collide is precisely that. It may take hours or even days to get collisions.”
The last time CERN switched on a major new research machine, the Large Electron Positron collider, LEP, in 1989 it took three days from the first attempt to collide to the first recorded collisions.
The current Large Hadron Collider run began on 20 November 2009, with the first circulating beam at 0.45 TeV. Milestones were quick to follow, with twin circulating beams established by 23 November and a world record beam energy of 1.18 TeV being set on 30 November. By the time the LHC switched off for 2009 on 16 December, another record had been set with collisions recorded at 2.36 TeV and significant quantities of data recorded. Over the 2009 part of the run, each of the LHC’s four major experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb recorded over a million particle collisions, which were distributed smoothly for analysis around the world on the LHC computing grid. The first physics papers were soon to follow. After a short technical stop, beams were again circulating on 28 February 2010, and the first acceleration to 3.5 TeV was on 19 March.
Once 7 TeV collisions have been established, the plan is to run continuously for a period of 18-24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010. This will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world’s foremost facility for high-energy particle physics.
Source: CERN
It looks like that guy’s about to be eaten by a giant robot squid.
So….its not a blackhole attempt?
Im confused.
Television should inform the public like you guys do.
I feel like that man is there for solving some puzzle or treasure hunt and he is confused about where to go as there are too many ways but he doesn’t know which one is the right way.
I reckon the previous post is SPAM…
Nah, it’s the “after photo” following LHC’s secret fifth experiment, the shrink ray.
The pigeons are scheming and plotting their next move.
An independent review of the long-term risks associated with possible black hole production at the LHC:
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/LHCrisk.pdf
@LHC Safety Review
I did not read everything but this paper is also basing itself on something that simply might not exist. So far string theory has not been proven to exist in our reality so there is no proof that we have more than 4 dimension so far. So big part of the paper is “guessing” imaginary risks.
I would love string theory to be real, that would be so cool. but right now there is no evidence so far.
If this paper is calculating all risks then it misses other risks, like some terroriste exploing a nuclear bomb inside the LHC at the moment a first black hole gets created. Or worse, a bird dropping a peace of bread scaring the operator and he accidentially presses the selfdestruct button.
Right now the biggest thread to human life is those conspiracy nuts scaring those people so hard that they commit suicide. More people will die because of those conspiracy theorists scare tactics than a formation of a black hole in the next billion of years.
@LHC Safety Review
The paper seems very thorough, but I have the feeling that somehow they left some positive parts out of it.
Also the life expectancy of Earth surviving the expansion of the Sun in a few billion so of years by moving Earth is over the top. Humans will have left Earth in the next million of years. The risk of consuming Earth by a black hole in 1 million years would be acceptable.
Can’t wait for some results once this superb machine starts getting into the real physics.
This photograph was on the OHP at a public presentation I attended about the LHC from Durham University. Apparently non of the physicists know who the man in the foreground actually is!!! Let’s just hope he knows who he is because he’s pretty famous now!
For those who irrationally worry about planet-consuming black holes at the LHC… what about the countless dangerous objects out in space that we really should be investigating to protect the Earth, comets, NEAs and PHAs, GRBs, AGNs, close by supernovas, and massive CMEs… and as somebody has already mentioned, we’ve probably only got a couple of hundred million years before our Sun starts to make life here a little unpleasant.
For a better world, bring on the LHC science… at some point our future may depend upon it!
At most the LHC will produce quantum amplitudes corresponding to black holes. or AdS/CFT physics. It will not be a bonified black hole that can eat the Earth up.
LC
Unless you are able to push two halves of the Earth’s mass through the collider towards each other I wouldn’t be too worried about Earth destroying black holes.
I’m definitely not a physicist, but I should add that I personally would not want to be within 100 miles if something goes “wrong” at the LHC though. Stuff like this always makes me think of the game “Half-Life” in it’s possibilities. Who knows what the effects would be of being in such close proximity to such weird states of matter?
We are talking about breaking the bonds of atomic structure, aren’t we?
I have always had a impression that the LHC could go max 7TeV? but its 14TeV!!
If say they find Higgs at 7TeV what then? maybe they are going to find something far more interesting at 14TeV who knows we will see.
@PhelanKA7,
The biggest risk at LHC is some transformer blowing up because of the massive energy beeing used to create the magnetic fields. Not the collisions themselves.
And you do realize that “Half-Life” is Fiction 😉
The LHC will be doing nothing new really. Cosmic rays slam into molecules of the atmosphere at energies in the TeV range and far higher all the time. If AdS black hole physics occurs at these energies then black hole amplitudes or channel production have been going on for billions of years. These have been happening directly on the lunar surface as well. So far no planet eating black holes have materialized. The LHC accelerates particles in a controlled situation with detectors so we can exactly measure these physical events. Cosmic rays are largely uncontrolled. So there is no reason to get concerned about any exotic physics from the LHC destroying Earth.
LC
@Olaf
Oh, I know. I was just being sorta cheeky.
I would realy love to be working at LHC!
I am more worried, because it is far more likely… that man will become extinct at their own hands, via nuclear or biological incident, before any black hole created by the LHC consumes the Earth.
The LHC will not produce a classical black hole (classical as in not QM physics) that can gobble up the Earth.
LC
……what if they will create a world blackout !?!?..|:)…|:)…anything it is possible , but I am certain that this experiment is tremendeous waste of people money, they will discover NOTHING, becouse the ONE is a fractal and it will replicate himself to infinite..LIFE IS ( ONE )REPLICATED TO INFINITE WICH CREATE UNICITY AND VARIETY….so goodluck in your ridiculous sand game…
How do you know nothing will be discovered? Given that you neither spell or write properly I suspect you don’t.
LC