tonystockert

hate to dampen everything but there won’t be any intentional collisions on the 10th, probably won’t be any until the end of the month.

The 10th is just when we will get full circulation of the beam around the whole ring (hopefully) and start ramping up to 5 TeV per beam energy. ( we’ll hit 7 TeV after the winter shut down).

The beams will need a lot of work to get them contained and under control, just one of the beams if “dumped” can start melting nearly a ton of solid copper in a few seconds, just to give you an idea of it’s strength. So we really don’t want the beam out of control going through parts of our very very precious detectors.

The actual beam dump was (last I heard) a big chunk of graphite which will reach temperatures upto around 2200 C during operation and still remain far far too hot for people to go into it’s room during the life of the experiment. (long shut downs not included, I guess) They also do a lot of de-focusing of the beams before they dump them to spread the energy out over the surface a bit, otherwise I think they would just go straight through.

LHCb (special b-physics experiment) actually has put parts of it’s inner most detector on a retracter (sp?) so during the first few weeks it’s not so close to the beam, because otherwise there is a very good chance it’ll get burnt to bits they even built a second one because they are so sure it will be

So don’t worry about the world ending on the 10th, it’ll more likely happen near the end of September, beginning of October when we actually start colliding the beams

and tbh, all this talk of black holes, just ignore it folks, it’s exceptionally unlikely to happen and even if it does they won’t live long enough to worry about. The press have just blown it all out of proportion.

When we start getting collisions I’ll give you all an update with hopefully some pretty pictures from the event display of ATLAS

and if your really lucky a screenshot of the oh-so exciting silicon tracker DAQ+DCS screen which I’ll be looking after…yawn….

that article sucked btw and Professor Otto Rossler (one of the folks who are arguing for the experiment not to run) is a god damn biochemist (no offence to biochemists) so what the **** does he know about high energy particle physics??? probably diddley squat!!