The Large Hadron Collider is going to skip medium-energy proton collisions, jumping straight to its maximum energy in 2013, after it finishes collecting lower-energy data and has its circuitry upgraded.
The particle accelerator, located outside Geneva, Switzerland, has recovered from its 2008 accident. And in 2009 it broke the world record for particle collision energy when its two oppositely directed proton beams each reached 1.18 TeV, for a total energy of 2.36 TeV.
That made it slightly more powerful than its US competitor, Fermilab, which has been colliding particle beams with energies of 1 TeV, adding up to a total energy of 2 TeV.
After a brief holiday hiatus, the LHC is getting ready to start up again. Its managers have decided to carry out collisions for two years at 3.5 TeV per beam. At the end of 2011, it will shut down for a year for circuitry upgrades, returning in 2013 at its maximum design energy of 7 TeV per beam, or 14 TeV in total.
It’s good to be alive at this exciting time!
Does anyone have any idea what will happen when energy of 14TeV is produced in a collision? Will the energy be safely contained?
Imagine if that thing malfunctioned, a protonic explosion, europe would be reduced to a smoldering crater.
Also, the scientists clearly aren’t superstitious setting the date at 2013, haha!
Smashing.
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
lol
Thought that said ‘large hardon’ at first.
helen says:
February 3, 2010 at 10:36 am
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
lol
Love the source code for that page, especially the javascript.
I thought they weren’t going to do that until they’d worked out what caused our flash forwards.
Are they shutting it down in 2011 and reopening in 2013 to avoid being blamed for anything that happens in 2012?
No chance of it breaking this time. It’d take a pretty big piece of baguette to stop it at maximum power!
@ Gordon Wilson: Don’t be alarmed, 14TeV sounds dramatic but is only 2 nanoJoules, or 5×10^-10 calories (half of a billionth). While it’s a heck of a lot for two sub-atomic particles to be sharing, it’s not a fat lot in our terms.
@Rob Palin: half a billionth of a calorie is not much, but what if the bagette gets in the way of the beams? There’s got to be quite a few calories in that, especially if it is buttered.
Ooooh, we have an extra year to live now… I’ll have to re-plan – damn!
Hahaha, funniest DB blog discussion ever.
Ahhhhhhh, that source code made my morning…
heehee.