It’s difficult to express just how fracking impressive the Large Hadron Collider is. You really have to be there to understand how overwhelming and ginormous it is. Still and all, maybe the video I took of the tour will help get the idea across (if you go to that YouTube page, there is a link right under the video that allows you to watch it in higher quality. I recommend doing that).
ATLAS and CMS are detectors, built to detect the shrapnel from the collisions of protons moving just a whisper slower than light itself. For the cast of characters and a description of this tour, take a look at my earlier post describing it. There are pictures there from the journey as well.
April 27th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Fracking/Frakking… Very BSG of you!
Excellent video! I am looking forward what will be discovered, when the LHC is operational!!
April 27th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
GREAT Vid Phil! I would do ANYTHING to be a part of this awesome undertaking (polish the scaffolding, sweep the tunnels ) Thanks for taking us along : )
April 27th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Jeezus! They’ve built the Krell Machine!
That was my first impression when you tilted the camera down the shaft. I could almost hear Morbius say “20 miles…”
- Jack
April 27th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
No, the globe wasn’t a trojan hadron. It’s the large hadron that they’re going to collide. I mean it IS the Large Hadron Collider.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Awesome video! When I last visited CERN the LHC was still the LEC and they haven’t already started the work on the LHC. By the way, is there a new rule that you have to wear helmet when visiting the LHC or was this because of construction still done at the site?
Greetings from Germany!
April 28th, 2008 at 12:32 am
That is DEFINATLEY the kind of place I’m gonna get when I move out of my parents house.
Anyone? Anyone get that reference?
April 28th, 2008 at 2:12 am
Are you sure the Krel didn’t build this?
April 28th, 2008 at 2:15 am
@Stargazer: It is now compulsory to have a helmet and security shoes and an oxygen regenerator mask when going in the tunnel. Plus they just put the biometric (iris recognition) control at the entrance gates.
April 28th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Sometime in June or July BBC Radio 4 are having a day about the CERN project, including a specially written Torchwood radio play.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Holy Half-Life (?), Phil.
That place is amazing. I hope you took your crowbar in case you ran into a headcrab.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:31 am
The ? above - it wouldn’t let me use a lambda.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Wow, just wow. When he looked down the access shaft did anyone else think of the death of the emperor in return of the jedi?
April 28th, 2008 at 7:36 am
[…] the Earth. The Bad Astronomer did a great post debunking this theory, and he’s just posted a video tour of the Collider that shows just how big it really is. del.icio.us this | digg this | Stumble It! […]
April 28th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I am simply humbled… just spectacular.
Thanks for sharing, BA…
April 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
So, I guess if they detect the Higgs Boson, it will go a LOOOONG way toward deciding between competing string theories. Now, THAT”S something I am in anticipation off. One (theory) to find them, one (theory) to bind them,,,ah, The Ring strikes again,,,
,,,well, the LHC is a RING of fire,,,or radiating protons,,,
,,,so cool,,,
Gary 7
April 28th, 2008 at 9:05 am
The Trojan Hadron is really the inspiration for the magnetic bottle used in Dan Brown’s novel. He was inspired by an attempt at CERN to build a real storage bottle for charged anti-particles. Turned out that, for one gram of p-bars, the coulomb repulsion force dictated a sphere of very large radius. The Trojan Hadron is that sphere!! Once it was determined that it absolutely would not fit into anyone’s back pocket, all plans to sneak it into the Vatican were called off.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:09 am
It could actually be more scientifically productive if the Higgs is not found within the energy domain predicted. It can be valuable for it to not be found at all by the LHC. When theory fails at such a critical point, therein lies guidance to make a better theory.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:09 am
What is the probability that we discover nothing at all? I of course don’t wish it happens!
April 28th, 2008 at 10:20 am
It would be interesting to see where and how the parts for this undertaking were manufactured; also, how the parts were engineered: with what criteria were the designers concerned when trying to determine materials which might meet the criteria - I mean in a general sense, of course, without giving away any trade secrets.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Thank you!
April 28th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Will,
There aren’t really any secrets. There’s nothing proprietary about the engineering of the accelerator. It’s pretty much just up-to-date variants on machinery that’s been in use for several decades, in other accelerators.
Many of the magnets in were manufactured at several other accelerator labs with great expertise in this specialty, such as Fermilab, near Chicago, and KEK, near Tsukuba, Japan. There are probably other sites as well, though I don’t recall them by name.
The design parameters are constrained by the ultimate needs of the experiments to be done at the LHC. The key parameter of course is the kinetic energy of the particles. A certain minimum energy is essential to generating certain collision products reliably. A Higgs boson is expected to have a mass within some interval. Each proton/anti-proton pair, as they annihilate, will provide energy equal to their combined rest-mass. A Higgs will be much more massive than that, so they must be pumped with lots of kinetic energy. Protons are of course electrically charged, so they tend to radiate some of their energy away as their paths are bent into a circle. For a given radius, there’s a speed at which the proton will radiate energy as fast as it can be pumped with more. After that, the machine could pump in energy all day long and not increase the energy of the protons. The only solution is to make an accelerator with a larger radius. That’s where the 27 km circumference comes from. That’s where the machine will be able to get the particles up to the energy of the Higgs boson.
Other considerations are things such as the so-called luminosity of the collisions. The luminosity is the rate at which the protons & anti-protons can be collided, so as to annihilate. The more particles that can be collided in each run, the more opportunities there are for the products to include the Higgs. (The Higgs, or any other particle, won’t be produced in every single collision. The collision products are governed by quantum mechanics, so there’s a probability with each annihilation of producing any specific particle. As the number of collisions increases, so also does the chance that every possible product for that energy will be generated and detected.) So anyway, the luminosity also governs things such as the strengths of the magnets. The strengths of the magnets, in turn, govern how much source electrical power the machine will need to draw, and so on.
One thing which helps mitigate electrical power usage is by using superconducting magnets. These magnets carry their electrical currents without resistive loss when at very low temperature. This means the machine is more energy efficient. So that’s another major engineering consideration, incorporating cryogenic jackets (carrying liquid helium) into the magnet design. This then dictates how the system will be networked together to deliver the helium from a nearby facility for generating it. (When Fermilab’s superconducting Tevatron went online, its liquid helium plant became the largest in the world, generating something like 1/2 of all liquid helium. The LHC’s needs will be much greater, so CERN’s helium facility will undoubtedly multiply the world’s helium production.)
April 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Incredibly impressive! It really is impressive to think of all the things that go into something like that, aside from just the great science that goes into the initial design and the purpose of it etc. the sheer engineering feat of getting it up and running is awe-inspiring to me.
P.S. I’m hella jelous lol
April 28th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
That was one of the most fantastic videos I watched on your blog, Phil! Really, you’ve done an excellent job! Really, really amazing!
The weird part actually on this video for me is, that I don’t get the scales. n this video, it doesn’t look so big - so it’s good that you give up some hints what the scale actually is!
I MUST see this thing, there is no way providing this….. oh, of course before the created black hole we suck us all up
April 28th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
You used the words “metres” and “kilometres” so many times I thought you were Canadian
I also note the spell checker says I’ve spelled metre incorrectly. HA!
Cool video
Pete
May 1st, 2008 at 12:48 am
Looks like a great place to film a Bond flick.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Holy crap, I didn’t realise how enormous it was. I used to think that nobody would build the giant underground labs so favoured by various storytellers. It gives me hope that funding for such a project could be found in the first place. Who cares about science when there is babies what need diapers?
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am
you should dub the soundtrack to firbidden planet into that vid.
‘“Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical scientific values, gentlemen”
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Wow. Just wow.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
[…] of posts about the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider (there’s also a podcast and here’s a link to a video about the LHC). The LHC is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (which is […]
May 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am
If they do this in May.Were all going to die ;(
September 9th, 2008 at 12:55 am
[…] More links here and here. […]
September 10th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Nothing to worry about LHC this is only test because we have no any lab except small lab. where there we can test protons collision so we construct it but we not received extra information about universe because the theory of atom follow to our view not hole universe.
Our scientist want to gravity responsible element or particles or dimensions like four and fifth, UFO always run another dimensions that’s by no effect of gravity on their ship
If we found leader of protons particle which guide like DNA (biology) so we can fite against gravity and run our ship about 1000 time of speed of light.
And also know about un imagine universe (theory of atom). And go un reached universe travels.
http://invention-world.blogspot.com/
September 12th, 2008 at 1:36 am
[…] Die Klima-Ausstellung im Deutschen Hygiene Museum in Dresden - Das “Beta-Buch””Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air” und eine deutsche Zusammenfassung bei Telepolis - Amerika der Windräder? Der “Pickens-Plan“ soll das in 10 Jahren erreichen - Sieger bei der RobuCup-WM: Die „Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels“ und das Team NimbRo (mit Videos) - Wissenschaft und Medien: Der INWEDIS-Projektbericht in Deutsch beim FZ Jülich - Die Website zum Magazin „Wunderwelt Wissen“ - Das elektronische Studio der TU Berlin und Festival “Inventionen 2008” - Sehr gut gemachtes Video zur Kernphysik bei teachers.tv, der CERN-Podcast und der Blog “Bad Astronomy“. […]
September 12th, 2008 at 1:38 am
[…] Die Klima-Ausstellung im Deutschen Hygiene Museum in Dresden - Das “Beta-Buch””Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air” und eine deutsche Zusammenfassung bei Telepolis - Amerika der Windräder? Der “Pickens-Plan“ soll das in 10 Jahren erreichen - Sieger bei der RobuCup-WM: Die „Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels“ und das Team NimbRo (mit Videos) - Wissenschaft und Medien: Der INWEDIS-Projektbericht in Deutsch beim FZ Jülich - Die Website zum Magazin „Wunderwelt Wissen“ - Das elektronische Studio der TU Berlin und Festival “Inventionen 2008” - Sehr gut gemachtes Video zur Kernphysik bei teachers.tv, der CERN-Podcast und der Blog “Bad Astronomy“. […]
September 12th, 2008 at 1:51 am
[…] 2008” - Sehr gut gemachtes Video zur Kernphysik bei teachers.tv, der CERN-Podcast und der Blog “Bad Astronomy“. Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player. var so = new […]