Life at the high-energy frontier (LHC article)

[n2doc]

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN and its cathedral-sized detectors will change the course of particle physics forever. Matthew Chalmers visits the lab to capture the mood as the most ambitious scientific project ever undertaken prepares for switch-on

Nick Chohan is looking forward to Christmas. For the last three years the amiable CERN physicist and his team have been working around the clock in a large metal hangar that straddles the Franco-Swiss border, carefully testing the 1232 superconducting magnets that will soon guide protons at almost the speed of light around the world's most powerful particle accelerator. This is no mean feat – it takes three people up to 12 hours just to connect one of the 15 m long, 35 tonne cylindrical dipoles to the test rig, and each one costs close to a nerve-wracking SwFr1m (over €600,000). But this month the last magnet is due to arrive at Chohan's lab, and by the end of the year all of them will have been cleared for installation underground.

Particle physicists are used to thinking big, of course. In their quest to understand how nature behaves at the most fundamental level, they have been building machines that smash particles together at ever higher energies for the best part of a century. But the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at the European particle-physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva, is rewriting the rules of the game.

"Few people fully appreciated the scale and complexity of the LHC at the beginning," says CERN's chief scientific officer Jos Engelen. "It has surprised many of us, myself included." And with the 27 km-circumference machine scheduled to switch on next year after more than 20 years of preparation, the excitement among CERN physicists is palpable. Once the LHC reaches its full design performance, some time early in 2008, protons will smash into one another about one billion times per second at an energy of 14 TeV (14 × 1012 electron-volts), recreating conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang and placing CERN at the forefront of high-energy physics for at least a decade.

more at link

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/26015

[mike_c]

1. this is going to be really exciting....

If they don't open the door to dimensions filled with demons, of course. I HATE it when that happens!

[Blackhatjack]

2. "protons will smash into one another about one billion times per second" ...hmmm???

I am wondering if there will be a reaction which produces results that cannot be controlled?

Just take a look at the first atomic explosions and what results the scientists expected before the detonation.

I don't expect catastrophic results, but I think it would be naive to think we know the scale of the reactions that will be unleashed.