Off I hop
Well it's time for me to catch a flight back to London. I may have another update or two when I get home, but bye for now!
Geoff
Nature Newsblog
Nature Newsblog
September 10, 2008
Science's coverage of LHC
While the rest of us are working like dogs, trying to tell the story of the LHC, look who I found enjoying a beer on the patio? It's Science's Adrian Cho.
To be fair, he's already filed his story. And the beer is non-alchoholic (due to restrictions on site today).
Image: GWB
ATLAS first images
Roger Jones, a physicist who I interviewed for the "Voices from the collider" segment, has posted some first images from ATLAS on his blog. Like CMS, these images, were taken when the beam struck a collimator, so they’re not from actual collisions. I actually just took a stroll to the ATLAS control room, which is a hop and a skip from where I’m sitting now, and it was full of energy.
Roger explained to me that this was the first taste of real data for the ATLAS subsystems, and they were frantically trying to understand what the detector was showing them. The mood was a little tense actually. Nothing like shaking down a brand new, multi-billion-dollar detector to make everyone jumpy.
Images: ATLAS, GWB
Beam 2 is through!
And just like that, beam 2 has completed its first circuit of the LHC. That's it, they've got it clockwise and anticlockwise (counterclockwise for the Americans in the readership). The day has been an official success. What a relief to all the beam guys who have been sweating bullets for a few weeks now.
The Big Bang Breakfast
Posted on behalf of Alison Wright, Chief Editor of Nature Physics.
I’m so excited I can hardly type. I’m just back from the ‘Big Bang Breakfast’, organized in Westminster by the UK science funding body STFC, to celebrate the start-up of the LHC.
Over tea and sausage sandwiches, physicists and media representatives watched this morning’s events unfurl, live from CERN. Just after 8:30am, the first flash of a monitor showed the beam had entered the 27-km ring, ready to be coaxed through each of the eight sectors of the machine in turn.
It was edge-of-the-seat stuff (certainly if you’re a particle physicist, and, I confess, I am). Twenty minutes later, the beam was half-way round and through one of the detectors, CMS. “They’ve got tracks!” The none-too-hushed whisper ripped round the hall like, well, a proton in an accelerator...
They made it look easy (although, believe me, it isn’t). Sector after sector, the beam sailed through. The breakfasting physicists couldn’t quite believe how well it was going — the previous CERN accelerator had laboured 12 hours to circulate its first beam. I needed more tea.
Now the beam was through another detector, LHCb, which was reporting signals too. The last sector, through the ATLAS detector, awaited. A text message from a friend in the ATLAS control room: “All power just went green”. This is it.
Lyn Evans, LHC project leader and our capable MC at CERN, directs everyone to watch for two flashes on the monitor — one for the beam going in, one for it completing the lap of the collider. And there they are, less than an hour from injection, two flashes of light marking the first circulation of beam and the beginning of an epic experiment. There’s applause, and I want to cry. More tea, I think.
Now we’re clustered round a laptop as the first signals come through from ATLAS. This project, this LHC and its detectors, has been 20 years in the making. There’s delight — and palpable relief — among the physicists: no one could have dreamed this start-up would happen so smoothly.
I raise my cup of tea to the LHC!
Beam 2, back on track.
They're back at it, and they've pushed beam 2 halfway around the machine now. Assuming nothing goes awry, they should successfully complete their test of the second beam shortly.
Beam 2 test delayed
A cryogenic problem at has delayed the anticlockwise beam test. The LHC’s big dipole magnets are all superconducting, and so they need to be cooled to just 1.9 K (around -271 C) in order to function. There’s apparently some minor temperature fluctuations at point 8 (see the map below), which have held things up by about an hour. I’m told that point 8 has been a little buggy over the past few nights, but it’s probably nothing too serious.
Voices from the cafeteria: CERN celebrity
That’s a photo of prominent theorist John Ellis from this morning, all ready for his close-up. The past week or so has promoted a lot of the physicists at CERN from particle pion to minor celebrity. It’s a bit of an odd situation for people who spend a lot of their working lives either underground or staring at computer screens.
But most of the people I’ve spoken to so far seem really happy to finally get some recognition. Click here to listen to Monica Dunford, a physicist from the University of Chicago, talking about her experience with the media.
Image: GWB
Starting beam 2 test
It’s not good enough to have a beam of protons going one way around the accelerator. In order to get collisions, well, you’ve got to have particles coming from the opposite direction. To that end, the guys in the control room have just begun testing beam 2. The sequence is exactly the same as beam 1—the protons will gradually make their way through the eight octants of the machine, one at a time (see below). But they'll go the opposite way.
Hopefully it will go just as smoothly as beam 1 did.
First photos from CMS
The Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two, big all-purpose detectors here at CERN has released its first photos from this morning’s event. The image (right), shows particles flying through the detector. They came not from beam-on-beam collisions, but from the beam of protons colliding with a collimator upstream from CMS. Jim Virdee, the CMS spokesperson, says that these images are actually a bit noisier than what they hope to eventually get from proton-proton collisions.
Fair enough, but they sure are pretty.
Image: CMS
Last block lifted!
They've lifted the last block and the beam's made it's way around! Applause is filling the control room and the press room for that matter.
Almost there!
These guys are working fast. They're already pushing to sector 7-8. Shouldn't be long at all now...
Beam "within the hour"
The beam has just made it to point six. Lyn Evans says he thinks beam will be circulating around the machine in an hour's time. "I think we're making very good progress," he says.
Meanwhile, CMS has reportedly seen tracks from the beam as it crashes into a beam stop upstream from their machine.
Incidently, if you're wondering where the beam is, here's a map of the LHC. They're currently injecting the beam all the way around to sector 6-7. Sector 6-7 has never been done before apparently, so hopefully no surprises.
image: CERN
Halfway point
They've made it to the halfway point, and Lyn Evans, the man behind the accelerator is looking pretty relieved about it all. As they move to point six they will dump the beam again to make sure that everything is running properly.
Beam away!
Well here we all are crammed into the globe, the weird little ball outside CERN. They've got a big TV up where we can watch as the LHC operators inject the first beam. They're not going all the way around in the first go. Rather, they're injecting it in phases around each of the LHC's eight sectors. It's a little hard to say exactly where they are because there's no audio at the moment, but it looks like they've gotten beam to point three or so.
September 09, 2008
CERN's advanced technology
The LHC may seem pretty advanced, but it’s got nothing on CERN’s high-tech coffee machines. That’s right, they’re fully automated and even have a touch-screen interface. It's the coffee of tomorrow, today folks. Most importantly, it's plenty tasty.
Image: Geoff
September 08, 2008
Going nuts for the LHC
It's only a few days before the official "start up" of the LHC, and people everywhere are getting all excited. Unfortunately, a lot of that excitement is focused around a single, erroneous question: "Will the LHC destroy the world?"
The answer, of course, is no. Even the Sun, the silliest of British tabloids, knows that (although they do have some pretty good ideas about how to pass the end of days, think Super Mario Brothers).
Nevertheless, there's a vocal and determined group of folks who are doing their best to convince the public that there really isn't going to be a 11 September. Some of them will post shortly on this blog I'm sure, and fair enough; it's a free world. But others are going too far. In the past few days, reports have come out that a few physicists at the LHC are recieving death threats from hardest of the fanatics.
Enough is enough. Leave your case to the courts and stop trying to scare the poor physicists.
Image: cern
Search
